Here is the situation. I got a number of hosts that I'd like to maintain via Ansible. The baseline configuration of the hosts like logins/users/etc is controlled by corporate IT overlords, so I can only change things that are related to application not general host setup. Some of the tasks related to application require running as 'root' or some other privileged user.
I do have a password-less sudo access on all the hosts, however all user home directories are located on NFS mounted volume. From my understanding how ansible works it first logs in into the target host as a regular user and places some files into $HOME/.ansible directory, then it switches to root user using sudo and tries to run the stuff from that directory.
But here is the problem. As I mentioned above the home directories are on NFS volume, so after ansible process on the target machine becomes root it can no longer access the $HOME/.ansible directory anymore due to NFS restrictions. Is there a way to tell ansible to put these work files outside of home directory on some non-NFS volume.
There were two parameters for the ansible.cfg configuration file introduced in Ansible 2.1 which allow specifying the location of temporary directory on target and control machines:
Ansible works by transferring modules to your remote machines, running them, and then cleaning up after itself. In some cases, you may not wish to use the default location and would like to change the path. You can do so by altering this setting:
remote_tmp = ~/.ansible/tmp
When Ansible gets ready to send a module to a remote machine it usually has to add a few things to the module: Some boilerplate code, the module’s parameters, and a few constants from the config file. This combination of things gets stored in a temporary file until ansible exits and cleans up after itself. The default location is a subdirectory of the user’s home directory. If you’d like to change that, you can do so by altering this setting:
local_tmp = $HOME/.ansible/tmp