Single host failes on ansible-playbook

[Frank Schiebel]

Hello!

Im new to ansible, and have a problem which i just cannot solve:

I use some very simple playbooks to do simple tasks in clasroom management on linux clients (ubuntu).
I.e. i use a playbook for shutting them down. Everything works fine except for one single host.
Whenever I try to use a playbok on a list ho hosts wicht contain this host, I get an error message
 for the host about wrong UTF-8 encoding while ansible-playbook is "GATHERING INFORMATION".

Regular ansible commands are working fine on the host, I can shut it down by executing
ansible -i hosts r110-ws16 -a "shutdown -h now"

but not with
ansible-playbook -i hosts -l r110-ws16 shutdown.yml

which shuts down all other hosts just fine.

I also use a playbook which runs locally (wakeonlan from the server). When this client is powered off,
everything is fine, the host starts up like all the other hosts.
So i figure the problem ist something that is returned from the host while gathering information.

But I have no idea how I can debug this further, any hint would be highly appreciated.

Thank you,

Frank
--

The host not working is r110-ws16

Ansible-playbook gives me this:

ansible-playbook -i hosts -l r110-ws16 shutdown.yml 

PLAY [all] ********************************************************************

GATHERING FACTS ***************************************************************
failed to parse json:     chunks = self.iterencode(o, _one_shot=True)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/json/encoder.py", line 264, in iterencode
    return _iterencode(o, 0)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xe7 in position 0: invalid continuation byte

fatal: [r110-ws16] => Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ansible/runner/__init__.py", line 394, in _executor
    exec_rc = self._executor_internal(host, new_stdin)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ansible/runner/__init__.py", line 485, in _executor_internal
    return self._executor_internal_inner(host, self.module_name, self.module_args, inject, port, complex_args=complex_args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ansible/runner/__init__.py", line 685, in _executor_internal_inner
    result = handler.run(conn, tmp, module_name, module_args, inject, complex_args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ansible/runner/action_plugins/normal.py", line 54, in run
    return self.runner._execute_module(conn, tmp, module_name, module_args, inject=inject, complex_args=complex_args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ansible/runner/__init__.py", line 369, in _execute_module
    data = utils.parse_json(res['stdout'])
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ansible/utils/__init__.py", line 306, in parse_json
    tokens = shlex.split(data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/shlex.py", line 279, in split
    return list(lex)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/shlex.py", line 269, in next
    token = self.get_token()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/shlex.py", line 96, in get_token
    raw = self.read_token()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/shlex.py", line 172, in read_token
    raise ValueError, "No closing quotation"
ValueError: No closing quotation


PLAY RECAP ********************************************************************
           to retry, use: --limit @/root/shutdown.retry

r110-ws16                  : ok=0    changed=0    unreachable=1    failed=0


The host file looks like follows:

[raum107]
r107-ws[01:15]

[raum110]
r110-ws[01:16]

[raum114]
r114-ws01

[computerraeume:children]
raum107
raum110

[auto-onoff:children]
raum110
raum107
raum114

The playbook is this (but the problem is the same with all other playbooks, as soon the client is powered on)

---
- hosts: all
  serial: 5
  tasks:
  - name: Shutting down remote workstations
    shell: /sbin/shutdown -h now