updating grub via Ansible without presenting a dialog box

[Kathy L]

We are updating packages via Ansible, and when grub needs to be run after the update, it fails on Debian 11.  When I run the update command manually, grub displays a dialog box asking the user to select the grub install device (/dev/vda, /dev/vda2, /dev/vda3, etc.).

We have our playbook running with an environment variable DEBIAN_FRONTEND: noninteractive.

How do we fix this error in Ansible?

[Rowe, Walter P. (Fed)]

Is there a way to specify the install device on the command line / in the module so it doesn't prompt?

Walter
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Walter Rowe, Division Chief
Infrastructure Services, OISM
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[Kathy L]

That's what we started to look at, but the issue becomes during a general package update, you don't always know if grub will need to be updated.  I'm not even sure how you'd tell this in an apt-get update.

[Todd Lewis]

Sounds like you'll need to `apt-mark hold grub` first, and handle updates to grub separately from the others.

Also sounds like a bug in the grub package.

[Kathy L]

If we do an apt-mark hold grub first, we are left with the dilemma of how to update grub without presenting a dialog.  This is only happening on Debian 11 boxes.  We have tried using the :

  environment:

     DEBIAN_FRONTEND:  noninteractive

option, but it is not working.

[Will McDonald]

The core problem here is a  grub / Debian issue rather than Ansible and it looks like you've already tried a few places for help. (https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/735375/update-grub-on-debian-11-fails and https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=154015)

1, Is it ALL Debian 11 machines or just one/a few?

2. How was(/were) the VM(s) installed/created? If you create a new, clean VM, and just do a grub-update do you have the same problem?

3. Try reviewing and feeding back on the questions/advice on either or both of SO and the Debian forum.

4. Try spinning up an AWS Debian 11 instance and compare/contrast to your broken instance(s). This is one I've just spun up moments ago:

root@ip-172-31-31-103:~# ls -l /etc/grub.d/
total 84
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10046 Nov  8 17:29 00_header
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  6260 Nov  8 17:29 05_debian_theme
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 14123 Nov  8 17:29 10_linux
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 14180 Nov  8 17:29 20_linux_xen
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 12910 Nov  8 17:29 30_os-prober
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  1372 Nov  8 17:29 30_uefi-firmware
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   214 Nov  8 17:29 40_custom
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   215 Nov  8 17:29 41_custom
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   483 Nov  8 17:29 README
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     0 Jan 24 04:24 enable_cloud

root@ip-172-31-31-103:~# ls -l /etc/default/grub.d/
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  15 Jan 24 04:27 15_timeout.cfg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 274 Aug  3  2022 init-select.cfg

root@ip-172-31-31-103:~# update-grub
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.10.0-21-cloud-amd64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-5.10.0-21-cloud-amd64
done

Something's borked your grub build config, you need to find and fix that.

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