Cannot use any Ansible playbook anymore. Error about "Data could not be sent to remote host"

Question

When I try to execute any Ansible playbook, the following error message appears:

fatal: [pxenode2]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "Data could not be sent to remote host \"10.0.2.102\". Make sure this host can be reached over ssh: unix_listener: cannot bind to path /home/ansible/.ansible/cp/10.0.2.102-22-root.nU3g4P0atprONMXr: No such file or directory\r\n", "unreachable": true}
fatal: [pxemail]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "Data could not be sent to remote host \"10.0.2.126\". Make sure this host can be reached over ssh: unix_listener: cannot bind to path /home/ansible/.ansible/cp/10.0.2.126-22-root.2yQe8XjNZQTT5d2O: No such file or directory\r\n", "unreachable": true}
fatal: [pxenode1]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "Data could not be sent to remote host \"10.0.2.101\". Make sure this host can be reached over ssh: unix_listener: cannot bind to path /home/ansible/.ansible/cp/10.0.2.101-22-root.PiPj5R1K3LZ7JEKC: No such file or directory\r\n", "unreachable": true}
fatal: [pxenode3]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "Data could not be sent to remote host \"10.0.2.103\". Make sure this host can be reached over ssh: unix_listener: cannot bind to path /home/ansible/.ansible/cp/10.0.2.103-22-root.dr33H9rhN9LCHi3K: No such file or directory\r\n", "unreachable": true}

Where does this information come from? Everything has worked perfectly before, so I'm not sure what I did to cause this error.

Can you connect to any of the given machines with ssh? Try running ssh -vvv <user>@10.0.2.101. Also, see here for a similar issue. — Artur Meinild, Aug 01 '25 at 08:26
Yes, I can connect to the machines via ssh without any problems — Søren Sjøstrøm, Aug 01 '25 at 12:14
Did some of the other suggestions about editing ansible.cfg help? Sorry, I'm not an expert on Ansible, I was merely trying to help debugging in general. — Artur Meinild, Aug 01 '25 at 12:21
Editing the ansible.cfg file did it. Thanks a lot for your effort. — Søren Sjøstrøm, Aug 02 '25 at 02:05
Please add the solution that worked for you as an answer here (you can answer your own questin), as it may help others as well. Thanks. — Artur Meinild, Aug 02 '25 at 05:36
The solution was to set pipelining = False in the [ssh_connection] section. I think you should write an answer yourself and get the credit for it — Søren Sjøstrøm, Aug 02 '25 at 14:50

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 02 '25 at 19:07

1

As per this answer, the fix was to set the following in ansible.cfg:

[ssh_connection]
pipelining = False

answered Aug 02 '25 at 19:07

Artur Meinild

31,385

Cannot use any Ansible playbook anymore. Error about "Data could not be sent to remote host"

1 Answers1