Ubuntu Ansible 'waiting for privilege escalation prompt'

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I ran into a hiccup today - provisioning a new Ubuntu VPS, the ansible playbook to apply our security hardening failed.

 ~/Developer/ansible_hl % ansible-playbook ssh-harden.yml --ask-vault-pass -e @vault.yml 
Vault password: 

PLAY [Copy the hardened SSHD_CONFIG file to the remote server] ****************************************************

TASK [Gathering Facts] ********************************************************************************************
[ERROR]: Task failed: Timeout (12s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt:
fatal: [<redacted IP>]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "Task failed: Timeout (12s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt:", "unreachable": true}

My routine is to run Ubuntu LTS, and when I was provisioning the server, I selected Ubuntu 26.04 LTS x64 without thinking. This LTS dropped in April, and excitingly the new versions of Ubuntu have Rust coreutils including sudo.

The cause of the issue above (where anisible waits for the sudo password request but never sees it) is that the password prompt in sudo-rs is different from real sudo. Here’s the old one:

ian@iris-orca:~$ sudo lsb_release -d
[sudo] password for ian: 
No LSB modules are available.
Description:	Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS
ian@iris-orca:~$ sudo --version
Sudo version 1.9.15p5
Sudoers policy plugin version 1.9.15p5
Sudoers file grammar version 50
Sudoers I/O plugin version 1.9.15p5
Sudoers audit plugin version 1.9.15p5
ian@iris-orca:~$

And the new one:

ian@ksd-on-syd-001:~$ sudo lsb_release -d
[sudo: authenticate] Password: 
Description:	Ubuntu 26.04 LTS
ian@ksd-on-syd-001:~$ sudo --version
sudo-rs 0.2.13-0ubuntu1
ian@ksd-on-syd-001:~$

So, [sudo] password for ian: vs [sudo: authenticate] Password: .

It’s not a big deal, and ansible has already made a fix for the incompatibility, it just hasn’t flowed down to me yet. Ubuntu 24 is still LTS so I’ll drop back to that.

For the adventurous, another possible approach would be to create an ansible user with passwordless ssh - I’d rather wait for the ansible update before I move to a Linux version using sudo_rs.

Rust

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been exciting to see some of the modern language features in Swift - it’s a real joy to work in when I think back to my C++ days which was some of the last commercial programming I did.

The buzz about Carbon got me wondering about other new languages and what might be going on with them. Rust seems to keep popping up in conversations so I thought I’d have a quick look.

Also read A half-hour to learn Rust and A Swift Guide to Rust

Those optionals, type inference, type safety, and exhaustive switch/match statements sure look familiar. Ranges too, and although the infinite range looks cool I’m not sure of the use-case.

Blocks evaluating to a result is cute. This is allowed:

let x = { let y = 1; // first statement let z = 2; // second statement y + z // this is the *tail* - what the whole block will evaluate to };

Notice the missing semicolon - that’s sugar for the ‘return’ that would be otherwise needed. Perhaps only from habit, I do miss the semicolons when writing Swift. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but currently I start to feel uncomfortable when spreading an expression out over multiple lines (for clarity) and just expecting LVM to figure it all out.

 Button("Toggle Light", action: {
 light.toggle()}
 )
 .padding()
 .font(.title)
 .foregroundColor(.white)
 .background(Color.accentColor)
 .cornerRadius(10)
 .padding()
 Spacer()

Underscore as a “throwaway” value turns up, but in the guise of default for the match statement.

Variable bindings, by default (with ’let’) are immutable in Rust, but can be marked as ’let mut’ to make them fully variable, as with Swift’s ‘var’.

Rust has “traits”, which currently my knowledge of Swift can’t do justice to a compare and contrast, but it definitely has a superclassy feel - like protocols and extensions.

They both have closures, but again, I’m getting out of my current depth on Swift to make any worthwhile comment.

I do enjoy about Swift how clear it is to read, from what I’ve seen of Rust, that’s not so much the case there, I guess there’s some other trade off involved.

Rust on blog.iankulin.com

Ubuntu Ansible 'waiting for privilege escalation prompt'

Rust