Learn how to fix the Ansible privilege escalation timeout error. Our DevOps Support team is here to help you with your questions and concerns.

Ansible Privilege Escalation Timeout | Troubleshooting Tips

If you have been running into the following error while working with Ansible on Linux CentOS 7, you are in the right place:

Timeout (12s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt

Today, we are going to take a look at the common common causes behind this error and how to fix them.

According to our experts, the error message lets us know that Ansible did not get the expected privilege escalation prompt within the timeout duration.

1. To begin with, we have to check our connection settings, like SSH key and username. We have to make sure they support a successful connection to the target system.

   Furthermore, we can confirm that our privilege escalation settings, like `become`, `become_method`, `become_user`, and `become_ask_pass`, are correctly configured.
2. Then, it is time to make sure that the user specified for privilege escalation has the needed sudo privileges on the target system. We can check the sudoers file on the target system to confirm that the specified user has the required permissions without needing a password.
3. If the timeout error persists, we can try increasing the timeout duration. This is done by setting the `ansible_become_timeout` variable in our playbook to a higher value.

   - name: Your Playbook
hosts: your_target_hosts
become: true
become_user: your_become_user
become_method: sudo
ansible_become_timeout: 30 # Set the timeout value in seconds
tasks:
# Your tasks here

4. If the above steps did not help we can run our Ansible playbook with increased verbosity for more detailed information about potential issues. We have to use the `-vvv` option for enhanced verbosity:

   ansible-playbook -vvv our_playbook.yml

   This gives us a look at the steps Ansible is taking and help us easily identify when the failure occurs.
5. In case our privilege escalation includes interactive prompts we have to make sure our playbook can handle such prompts. Interactive prompts can disrupt automated scripts, causing timeouts.

Let us know in the comments which one of the above troubleshooting tips helped you resolve the Ansible privilege escalation timeout error.

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Conclusion

At the end of the day, our Support Experts demonstrated how to fix the Ansible privilege escalation timeout error.