[Najdorf] appliance comes with user manageiq but with no home

[szajac01]

Installing a new appliance Najdorf from manageiq download shows that application runs now with the new manageiq user.
But this one has no home directory. Is it a wanted behavior ?
What about ansible configuration ? (Using embedded ansible)
How to configure it ? Running as root, as manageiq ?

Can someone give more explanations on how to deal with this change?

thank you

[szajac01]

I've also seen that /opt/manageiq/manageiq-appliance/LINK/root directory has been removed on Najdorf

[Fryguy]

The lack of a home directory was intentional, I believe, though we are seeing issues with it, particularly with ansible playbooks that assume a HOME directory exists.

@agrare @kbrock Can you comment here?

[agrare]

Yes the manageiq user was intended to be a system user (think the postgres or httpd user) not a user with an interactive login. Ansible does print a nasty warning about not being able to load .ansible.cfg but (getting outside my lane a bit here) that isn't where we want ansible config to come from and it works without that file just fine.

[Fryguy]

What about ansible configuration ? (Using embedded ansible)

Ansible configuration is passed as ENV vars by our launcher for ansible-runner.

[Fryguy]

As a workaround, does setting the env vars work for you? We can investigate allowing user-managed ansible.cfg in the meantime.

[Fryguy]

Related issue: ManageIQ/manageiq-rpm_build#307

[kbrock]

also of note with .ansible.cfg. It is currently looking for that in /root/, and we are trying to run these scripts as non-root.

If we run this as a non-root user, then we need to manage scattered configuration which is not fun

[szajac01]

Ok, thanks for the clarification. So we got those message when running embedded ansible
No such file or directory: b'/home/manageiq/.ansible'
2022-10-14 12:33:53,477 p=3152 u=manageiq n=ansible | Using /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg as config file

I did add our specific settings which was stored in /opt/manageiq/manageiq-appliance/LINK/root/.ansible.cfg in /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
(roles_path,log_path,...)
But i stil have a problem, even if logs are now stored in the file specified in /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
A play that runs with embedded manageiq returns an error message ERROR! couldn't resolve module/action 'module_name_xxx'
Same play can run normally locally on the appliance.

Do i miss something ?

[Fryguy]

Sorry, I meant where (which directory) on the appliances are you installing the roles

[szajac01]

Hi, i don't know exactly what you mean. Our custom roles are directly stored in ansible the project which is stored in gitlab project so they are imported through embedded ansible.

[kbrock]

I would prefer if you would store ansible configuration changes in /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg and not in /.ansible.cfgsince we want/.ansible.cfg` to go away.

We did run into issues changing /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg files in our rpm, so we've changed the process to make no configuration changes via environment variables instead.

The issue we ran into had something to do with another rpm (ansible) owning the /etc/ansible/ files and our rpm wanting to change it. Yes, it is a configuration file, so there wasn't a conflict per say, but there were some issues. You can always chalk that up to being my user error, but conceptually, I could see why there would be an issue.

[szajac01]

That does not answer my problem which is that running embedded ansible does fail with ERROR! couldn't resolve module/action ...
even if configuration has moved to /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg
what can i do concretely to fix that behavior ?

[szajac01]

Hi, specific collections has to be installed in the /usr/share/ansible/roles as manageiq user can access it.
There was installed under root user.

Problem is now fixed, using /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg,

thanks and regards