Using privileged mode (become) in Ansible without a password
So I was working on automating some stuff using Ansible when the necessity to have password less superuser access came up. A simple way would be adding the ansible management key to the root account itself and allow SSH to root, but allowing ssh to root is usually a bad idea.
I tried many things – NOPASSWD in sudo entry, requiretty, etc. And after nearly two hours of digging a spark ignited and I found a way – Linux has PAM module called pam_wheel.so which can implicitly allow root access via su when a user is present in the wheel group (the group can be configured in module options). This module is disabled by default on most Linux distributions, in fact Ubuntu doesn’t even have a wheel group. But in this particular case I was managing CentOS which has the wheel group.
Add the Ansible management user to the wheel group and enable the pam_wheel.so module:
# /etc/pam.d/su
# Uncomment the following line to implicitly trust users in the "wheel" group.
auth sufficient pam_wheel.so trust use_uid
Now when you SSH to the machine using the ansible user and run su – it will give you root access without asking for password. Consequently, now when you set become_method = su in your Ansible configuration by way of editing config files, setting variables in playbook or inventory, etc. Ansible will become privileged without a password.
NileshGR 