Documentation

3. Known Issues

3.2. Errors when editing objects

Ansible Tower implements a role based access control system. It may appear that you can edit objects that do not belong to you–like being able to pull up an edit dialog of your teammates, which you have been granted permission to view–but when you try to edit something, you will receive a 403 error and you cannot view any information you should not already have access to as defined in the system.

3.3. Host comparisons against a single host

When performing a host comparison against a single host, if there is only one (1) run for the selected date, Tower may display a message saying it could not find any scan job runs in one of the columns.

3.4. Host comparisons against two hosts

When performing a host comparison against two hosts, you can only select from a single page of hosts.

3.5. Live events status indicators

Live events status dots are either seen as a red or orange dot at the top of the Tower Dashboard when something goes wrong, or they are not seen at all to indicate a healthy system state. If you encounter a red or orange live events status indicator, even when your system seems fine, the following suggestions may offer a solution:

  • Try manually refreshing/reloading your browser page.
  • Try changing web browsers, as Firefox and Safari have been reported to have issues trusting self-signed certificates.
  • Try creating a self-signed certificate that matches your DNS and import it into your trust manually.
  • Try using an incognito or private browsing session.
  • Try disabling your browser plugins to ensure none are blocking the service.
  • Try accessing Tower at https://tower-ip:8080/ which should allow you to accept the certificate for the machine.

Live event status dots are used for troubleshooting problems with your Tower instance and the socketio logs can point out anything problematic. You can collect troubleshooting help by running a sosreport. As root, run the command sosreport from your system to automatically generate a diagnostic tar file, then contact Ansible’s Support team with the collected information for further assistance.

Note

Starting with Ansible Tower 2.2.0, live events status indicators only appear if Tower detects a problem. In earlier releases, a green status dot was shown to indicate a healthy system.

3.6. Slower than expected performance

Slow performance issues have been reported against Ansible Tower beginning with version 2.2.0.

You may experience slower than expected system performance if you have a large number of job templates, users, credentials, permissions, projects, and/or inventories.

If you find that loading the job template page for normal users is unacceptably slow, run the “Cleanup Deleted Data” management job with days = 0. Refer to Management Jobs in the Ansible Tower Administration Guide for more information.

3.7. sudo/su not working as expected for local playbooks or playbooks with local_actions

Instances have been reported that sudo/su commands do not work when using an entirely local playbook or a playbook with some local_actions cases. This is likely due to PRoot being enabled. To use sudo/su commands with local playbooks or those with local_actions, PRoot must be disabled. You can disable PRoot by navigating to the /etc/tower/settings.py file, setting AWX_PROOT_ENABLED=False, then restarting services with the ansible-tower-service restart command.

3.8. Installation program does not enable su command support

During the testing of Ansible Tower 2.3.0, it was discovered that the installation program does not handle the option to enable su command support.

When using the Tower installation program to install Tower to a remote system where su access is required, the installation program will not work. To workaround this issue, you should manually run the ansible-playbook command with the --su parameter.

3.9. Problems when using SSH customization

The PRoot functionality in Ansible Tower limits which directories on the Tower file system are available for playbooks to see and use during playbook runs. If you are attempting to customize SSH behavior by using a custom SSH configuration in the Tower user’s home directory, this directory must be added to the list of directories exposed by PRoot.

For example, to add a custom SSH config in /var/lib/awx/.ssh/config and make it available for Tower jobs, edit the /etc/tower/settings.py file and add that path to the AWX_PROOT_SHOW_PATHS variable:

AWX_PROOT_SHOW_PATHS = [ '/var/lib/awx/.ssh/' ]

Once the paths you need have been added to settings.py, restart Tower using the admin utility script, ansible-tower-service:

ansible-tower-service restart

3.10. Ubuntu unsupported for bundled installations

If you are using the bundled installer for Ansible Tower 2.3.0, note that only Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS are supported at this time. Ubuntu support has not yet been added.

3.11. YAML parser errors when installing Tower without python-yaml installed

Instances of YAML parser traceback errors have been reported when users attempt to install Tower without python-yaml being installed. In this scenario, the installation program uses the built-in YAML parser, but the built-in YAML parser is unable to parse a YAML variable initialized to an empty dictionary (e.g. {}).

The traceback may look like the following:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./configure", line 787, in <module>
    if conf['configure_private_vars'].get(field, None):
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute ‘get’

To workaround this issue, remove the offending variable (such as configure_private_vars: {}) from the Tower settings file, tower_setup_conf.yml.