Let’s look into the steps to fix the “Ansible warning: sftp transfer mechanism failed on” issue in this article. At Bobcares, with our Server Management Services, we can handle your server-related issues.

Ansible [warning]: sftp transfer mechanism failed on

Sometimes the Ansible Playbook keeps displaying the below message:

In this article, we’ll look into some of the solutions for the error.

1. scp_if_ssh = true

The SCP command, which stands for “secure copy,” copies data over a secure, encrypted network connection on Unix-like operating systems. It is comparable to the common Unix command, cp, but it uses a secure network connection instead. Here’s how to copy files to distant Linux servers even more securely by combining the secure copy command with ssh key authentication. We’ve to create an override with the ansible.cfg file.

[ssh_connection]
scp_if_ssh=True

However, we can’t easily find the default path of ansible.cfg file.

2. ansible setup module failure

Unless we specify differently, Ansible typically includes settings that ensure to verify the return codes of commands and modules and it fails quickly, causing an error to be handled. A command that returns something other than 0 occasionally isn’t an error. It’s not necessary for a command to constantly state that it “modified” the remote system.

To collect important variables about remote hosts that may be utilized in playbooks, this module is automatically called by playbooks. To see which variables a host has access to, /usr/bin/ansible can run it directly. Numerous details about the system are automatically provided by Ansible. Windows targets are also supported by this module.

3. ansible-sftp

Ansible depends on being able to transfer files to the remote machine. It uses sftp to do this by default. We can override this to use SCP using scp_if_ssh. Occasionally users may be managing a remote system that doesn’t have SFTP enabled. We need to change the sftp settings in sshd_config:

sudo vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config
/ (find) sftp
change:
Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server
to  (yyp to copy line) :
#Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-serverSubsystem sftp internal-sftp

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Conclusion

In this article, we look into some of the reasons and solutions that may cause the “Ansible warning: sftp transfer mechanism failed on” issue.