Ansible skip unreachable hosts

Question

Hello I have written a script to ping all my inventory hosts. Some are behind VPN services so before I can ping them I set up a tunnel.

This works fine, however if the tunnel is set up but the ansible ping does not succeed the entire play just halts and none of the subsequent tasks get executed ( tunnel does not get closed / rest of tasks for host that are reachable do not get executed )

How can I make the play continue and just skip the host that was unreachable? I've looked at "meta clear_host_errors" but that's not it.

Here's my script

- hosts:
    - liveservers-direct
    - liveservers-special
    - liveservers-keypair
    - testservers-direct
    - testservers-special
    - testservers-keypair
    - intern
  gather_facts: no
  strategy: debug
  become: no
  tasks:
  - name: Ping some servers
    ping:


- hosts:
    - liveservers-vpn
    - testservers-vpn
  strategy: debug
  gather_facts: no
  become: no
  serial: 1
  vars_files:
   - ../roles/vpn/vars/customers.yml
  tasks:
  - include: ../roles/vpn/tasks/connect.yml icao="{{hostvars[inventory_hostname]['icao']}}"
  - ping:
  - name:
    meta: clear_host_errors
  - include: ../roles/vpn/tasks/disconnect.yml icao="{{hostvars[inventory_hostname]['icao']}}"

fatal: [server.behind.vpn]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "Failed to connect to the host via ssh: ssh: connect to host 10.xx.xx.xx port 22: Connection timed out\r\n", "unreachable": true}

above error happens on "ping" how do I make it skip the failure and just continue with the rest of the hosts? the play just stops now when it reaches the unreachable host, but a few more need to be checked

Thought it would be more stable to do the servers behind a VPN one by one. ( these aren't many ) — Synbitz Prowduczions
doesn't work it just opens a tunnel to the first host and all the other tunnels fail. things got worse — Synbitz Prowduczions
I think your problem stems from how you organized your plays. You have a whole play that connects to the vpn, pings, and disconnects, so if this play fails it will not continue to the next play. When a play fails it brings the whole playbook to a stop. I would investigate combining these two very similar plays into one play using when to distinguish host (or really group) specific tasks. — Andrew H

GPX GPX · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-06T07:08:03

This will soon be possible in the upcoming 2.7 release of Ansible, with the ignore_unreachable keyword.

See the release notes for 2.7 - https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/stable-2.7/changelogs/CHANGELOG-v2.7.rst#major-changes

New keyword ignore_unreachable for plays and blocks. Allows ignoring tasks that fail due to unreachable hosts, and check results with is unreachable test.

Ansible skip unreachable hosts

2 Answers