Reboot with Ansible raw ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

You would think rebooting a machine would be easy? Me too, but damn did this take time 😅

The problem was that I did not have Python on the target system. Meaning I can not use the reboot module. The only thing available was the raw module.

ansible.builtin.raw – Executes a low-down and dirty command — Ansible Documentation

It is even called the "dirty command". What could go wrong?

But before we begin, I need to introduce you to Gary: ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
I stumbled across this one during my research and he will help us do the reboots.

I tried several things and combinations with sleep which did not work. Then I came across nohup reboot &>/dev/null & exit:

      - name: Going for a reboot ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
        raw: ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no root@{{ ansible_host }} "nohup reboot &>/dev/null & exit"
        delegate_to: localhost

This worked fine... mostly. Some machines weren't rebooting which I could not understand and do not understand to this day.

After some more testing, I thought about running the reboot command as an on-time systemd-timer. And systemd can actually do this with systemd-run --on-active=3. Neat! And here is the solution which worked as far as I can tell for now.

     - name: Going for a reboot ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
        raw: systemd-run --on-active=3 shutdown -r now

      - name: Pause
        pause:
          seconds: 5

      - name: Wait for SSH 
        register: result
        raw: systemctl is-active system-sshd.slice
        until: result.stdout.find("active") != -1
        retries: 30
        delay: 5

Hope this saves you some time. Man, I have wasted waaaay too much time and energy for a simple reboot.

Have a great day!