Attempted Ubuntu 20.04 - systemd 245 - Warning

[hungrymonkey]

Hi Everyone,

I am posting this issue as a warning. You have to update to ansible 2.9.8+ for any distro with systemd 245+ which includes Ubuntu 20.04, Fedora 32, etc.

ansible/ansible@bd4fdb1

TASK [matrix-common-after : Populate service facts] ****************************************************************************************************************************
fatal: [matrix.domain.com]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "msg": "Malformed output discovered from systemd list-unit-files: accounts-daemon.service                        enabled         enabled      "}

[hungrymonkey]

Should I document the issue?

[hungrymonkey]

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/blob/master/docs/ansible.md

[pushytoxin]

Ubuntu ships a broken Ansible, but the bug isn't reported yet, the priority is to have it fixed upstream:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ansible

Depending on how long it will take to get the maintainer to update Ansible to v2.9.8 or above, it could be a good idea to document this issue, especially since more and more people will opt for running 20.04LTS, all of them will run into this bug.

[pushytoxin]

I opened the issue on launchpad, here's the link
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ansible/+bug/1880359

If you have an ubuntu one account, you can mark yourself as affected.

[hungrymonkey]

@pushytoxin This bug affects everyone who attempts to talk to a systemd 245+ distro. Ubuntu 20.04 might be a good start but it will affect everyone.

[pushytoxin]

Know of any other distros that ship systemd=245 together with ansible<2.9.7? Fedora is unaffected, and neither is debian (except buster-backports)
Just checked SUSE, unaffected.

[pushytoxin]

Sorry, I just realized what you said. So this also affects people who use an older version of ansible to connect to a remote host with a newer systemd. I only ever used ansible on a localhost connection.
In that case there should definitely be a note on this.

[spantaleev]

Indeed! This bug only affects people running outdated Ansible against a server with newish systemd (so far that's Archlinux and Ubuntu 20.04, it seems).

Since Ansible has been fixed and there's been a new release since a long time ago, the proper solution seems to be to get it updated.

Ubuntu is just very slow to do this. I remember a similar issue affecting us a few years back, where Ubuntu developers would just not update Ansible for months.

---

A good workaround is to Use Ansible via Docker.

Not sure if that would work with ansible_connection=local though.

---

We may also update roles/matrix-common-after/tasks/start.yml to apply our workaround (not using service_facts) on other distros.

Seems like always using the workaround is a potential solution, but it's kind of ugly (very long output). It may be better to apply it for people who ask for it (perhaps --extra-vars="avoid_service_facts=yes")

[ghost]

you can just work around this issue by using the python3 version of ansible.

pip3 install ansible

[kgtzy]

this issue was solved by ansible/ansible@bd4fdb1#diff-5fe2fdf32cea9df92893b26b933806b6ff6193d72e0774387459e2b7789f9189

worked for me on ubuntu 20.04 ansible 2.9
hope it helps

[spantaleev]

I've added some notes about this via 3fd198e