copy module with force=no intermittently reports "ok" status even when destination file does not exist

[David Banks]

Hey there,

I am spawning some VMs using vagrant (CentOS 6.5 images) and copying a file to them.  I only want to copy the file if it does not already exist, so that I can repeatedly run my playbooks against the host.

My copy task looks like this:

    - name: Upload the default iptables configuration
      copy: src=iptables.cf dest=/etc/sysconfig/iptables force=no
      sudo: yes

Roughly every 1 in 4 runs -- when reproducing on a fresh VM using "vagrant destroy -f myvm; vagrant up myvm; ansible-playbook -i myinventory playbook.yml" -- the 'copy' module will report an 'ok' status and *not* copy in the file, despite the fact that the file definitely did not exist when the task was run.  The rest of the time the task will correctly report a 'changed' status and correctly copy the file.

I was unable to reproduce this when running against localhost.  However, the behaviour is not dependent on the choice of destination file.  I can try "/tmp/nonexistent-file-i-made-up" and it will reproduce with the same frequency.  This makes me think that it's not due to a timing issue in the VM boot, as was my first thought.

I have no idea why this would happen, or how I can debug further, does anyone have an idea?

I am working around it by doing an explicit check before:

    - name: Check for iptables configuration existence
      action: stat path=/etc/sysconfig/iptables
      register: iptables_stat

    - name: Upload the default iptables configuration
      copy: src=iptables.cf dest=/etc/sysconfig/iptables
      sudo: yes
      when: not iptables_stat.stat.exists

This doesn't have the same issue, although it does have the obvious race condition.

Dave

[Michael DeHaan]

" the 'copy' module will report an 'ok' status and *not* copy in the file, despite the fact that the file definitely did not exist when the task was run.  "

I'm highly skeptical here but it's not quite fair for me to claim server gremlins without first using the server gremlins detector, which I don't have.

Can you see if you can get to the bottom of why it is happening?

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