Launching applications remotely with GUI

[Chethan S]

I was attempting to launch an application through an Ansible Tower job in a remote Windows VM. I'm logged into the remote PC with the same credentials with which my Ansible playbooks are run. For the sake of simplicity, my playbook is like this - 

---

- name: Register and turn on VMs

  hosts: all

  tasks:

   - name: Start VM

     raw: notepad

I expect the above playbook to launch notepad in GUI mode on the remote Windows PC I'm connected to. However, this only adds up a process for notepad.exe but the GUI doesn't appear. The tower job does not complete either and I end up canceling it. How to ensure that the application launches with a GUI and not as a process?

[Chethan S]

Ignore those names: I am trying to achieve something else (i.e., turning on VMs but I need them to come up in GUI mode. I guess if notepad can come up, I will figure out the rest.

[J Hawkesworth]

I'm fairly certain you won't have a GUI session, so I think windows has no way of knowing which session to display the notepad user interface in.

You might be able to get a session established by setting auto logon (if you can live with implications of using auto logon) - there's a powershell script here that can set autologon http://poshcode.org/2982

Hope this helps.

Jon

[Chethan S]

In my case, I have an active GUI session. I'm using it to verify if things are working as expected. 

Another approach which I have tried in the meantime is using psexec which is known to be helpful in such cases, that is to show the GUI. While I was able to launch notepad.exe by using the psexec executable on the client machine, Ansible used to report the operation as failed. .

Don't Ansible users use GUI at any point in time to verify if the operations are running as expected? Are end-to-end operations run in an unattended fashion?

[J Hawkesworth]

Generally ansible is intended to fail if the modules can't achieve their goals.  When I'm developing playbooks I do sometime watch the GUI, although much of the checking I do is automated, typically by using register http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_variables.html#registered-variables to record the state returned by modules and then using assert http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/assert_module.html to ensure the returned state is what I expect.

Its true that some of the checking I do does rely on Powershell, although often this can be accomplished with a single-line Powershell command, for example

- name: check if Windows8.1-KB2999226-x64.msu hotfix has been applied
  raw: Get-Hotfix -Id KB2999226
  register: hotfix_status
  ignore_errors: true

I've used Get-Process in a similar way - something like

Get-Process -Name notepad

Hope this helps,

Jon