Keyboard provisioning for inline shell commands

[mcandre]

SUMMARY

Legacy targets such as DOS do not support sshd, nor do they provide reliable telnetd access. For these targets, it would be perhaps more convenient to operate the target in a VM, and send provisioning via the hypervisor's keyboard emulator, similar to boot_command in Packer scripts.

Could we get a similar mechanism for Ansible, that would plugin naturally to Vagrantfile's, allowing these older systems to be provisioned with hypervisor keyboard commands?

ISSUE TYPE

• Feature Idea

COMPONENT NAME

shell

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Workaround when sshd is unavailable and telnetd is either unavailable, corrupts user input, and/or blocks other networking provisioning applications (ping, hget, wget, curl, ftp, nc, etc.) from succeeding.

[ansibot]

Files identified in the description:

• lib/ansible/modules/commands/shell.py

If these files are inaccurate, please update the component name section of the description or use the !component bot command.

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[ansibot]

Files identified in the description:

• lib/ansible/modules/shell.py

If these files are incorrect, please update the component name section of the description or use the !component bot command.

click here for bot help

[bcoca]

Hi!

Thanks very much for your submission to Ansible. It sincerely means a lot to us that you've taken time to contribute.

Unfortunately, we are going to decline this request because aside from the complexity of implementation (also need to add file transfers and bidrectional communication by hacking the hypervisor) and there is no real demand for this feature.

However, we're absolutely always up for discussion.
Since this is a really busy project, we don't always see comments on closed tickets, but want to encourage open dialog.

You can stop by the development list, and we'd be glad to talk about it - and we might even be persuaded otherwise!

• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ansible-devel

In the future, sometimes starting a discussion on the development list prior to implenting a feature can make getting things included a little easier, but it's not always necessary.

Thank you once again for this and your interest in Ansible!