Ansible Timeout (12s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt

Question

I'm having trouble running my Ansible playbook on AWS instance. Here is my version:

$ ansible --version
ansible 2.0.0.2

I created an inventory file as:

[my_ec2_instance]
default ansible_host=MY_EC2_ADDRESS ansible_user='ubuntu' ansible_ssh_private_key_file='/home/MY_USER/MY_KEYS/MY_KEY.pem'

Testing connection to my server:

$ ansible -i provisioner/inventory my_ec2_instance -m ping
default | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false, 
    "ping": "pong"
}

Now when running my playbook on this inventory I get the error Timeout (12s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt as follows:

$ ansible-playbook -i provisioner/inventory -l my_ec2_instance provisioner/playbook.yml

PLAY [Ubuntu14/Python3/Postgres/Nginx/Gunicorn/Django stack] *****

TASK [setup] *******************************************************************
fatal: [default]: FAILED! => {"failed": true, "msg": "ERROR! Timeout (12s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt: "}

NO MORE HOSTS LEFT *************************************************************

PLAY RECAP *********************************************************************
default                    : ok=0    changed=0    unreachable=0    failed=1

If I run the same playbook using the .vagrant/provisioners/ansible/inventory/vagrant_ansible_inventory as the inventory parameter it works perfectly on my Vagrant instance.(I believe, proving there is nothing wrong in the playbook/roles itself)

Also, if I run it with an -vvvv, copy the exec ssh line and run it manually it indeed connects to AWS without problems.

Do I need to add any other parameter on my inventory file to connect an EC2 instance? What am I missing?

Answer 1

There is a git issue about this error that affect various versions of Ansible 2.x in here https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/13278#issuecomment-216307695

My solution was simply to add timeout=30 to /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg.

This is not a "task" or "role" timeout and was enough to solve the error (I do have some roles/tasks that take much longer than that).

Answer 2

$ vim /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg

SSH timeout

[defaults]
timeout = 10 ( change to 60 )

Answer 3

In my case, the root cause was an incorrect entry in /etc/hosts for the localhost, causing a 20s delay for any sudo command.

127.0.0.1 wronghostname

Changed it to the correct hostname to fix it. No more delay for sudo/privileged commands.