Ansible can't ping my vagrant box with the vagrant insecure public key

Question

I'm using Ansible 2.4.1.0 and Vagrant 2.0.1 with VirtualBox on osx and although provisioning of my vagrant box works fine with ansible, I get an unreachable error when I try to ping with:

➜  ansible all -m ping
vagrant_django | UNREACHABLE! => {
    "changed": false, 
    "msg": "Failed to connect to the host via ssh: Permission denied (publickey,password).\r\n", 
    "unreachable": true
}

The solutions offered on similar questions didn't work for me (like adding the vagrant insecure pub key to my ansible config). I just can't get it to work with the vagrant insecure public key.

Fwiw, here's my ansible.cfg file:

[defaults]
host_key_checking = False
inventory = ./ansible/hosts
roles_path = ./ansible/roles
private_key_file = ~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key

And here's my ansible/hosts file (ansible inventory):

[vagrantboxes]
vagrant_vm ansible_ssh_user=vagrant ansible_ssh_host=192.168.10.100 ansible_ssh_port=22 ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key

What did work was using my own SSH public key. When I add this to the authorized_keys on my vagrant box, I can ansible ping:

➜  ansible all -m ping       
vagrant_django | SUCCESS => {
    "changed": false, 
    "failed": false, 
    "ping": "pong"
}

I can't connect via ssh either, so that seems to be the underlying problem. Which is fixed by adding my own pub key to the vagrant box in authorized_hosts.

I'd love to know why it doesn't work with the vagrant insecure key. Does anyone know?

PS: To clarify, although the root cause is similar to this other question, the symptoms and context are different. I could provision my box with ansible, but couldn't ansible ping it. This justifies another question imho.

Possible duplicate of Can't ssh to vagrant VMs using the insecure private key (vagrant 1.7.2) — techraf

techraf techraf · Accepted Answer · 2017-11-24T11:17:17

I'd love to know why it doesn't work with the vagrant insecure key. Does anyone know?

Because Vagrant insecure key is used for the initial connection to the box only. By default Vagrant replaces it with a freshly-generated key, which you’ll find in .vagrant/machines/<machine_name>/virtualbox/private_key under the project directory.

You’ll also find an automatically generated Ansible inventory in .vagrant/provisioners/ansible/inventory/vagrant_ansible_inventory, if you use Ansible provisioner in Vagrantfile, so you don't need to create your own.

Ansible can't ping my vagrant box with the vagrant insecure public key

1 Answers