win_reboot: Default reboot_timeout (600 sec) may not suffice

[dagwieers]

SUMMARY

Currently the win_reboot module comes with a pre-configured default value of 600 seconds for the reboot_timeout. For normal reboot this may suffice, but a few conditions could result in unexpected failures.

• The system may have updates applied before rebooting, which results in additional pre-boot and post-boot processing, and occasionally additional reboots.

• The system may have been configured with a delayed startup of the WinRM service, a necessary mitigation for issues related to WinRM being available before the system was fully settled (causing unexpected behavior, e.g. AD operations failing).

• Physical systems may take a longer time to shut down and reboot.

Currently there is no straight-forward way for Ansible to check if updates have been applied and take these into account when rebooting. So it is probably best for the user to increase the reboot_timeout to something higher than the highest value you may encounter, like reboot_timeout: 3600.

This ticket exists to discuss possible workarounds or improvements to the general issue.

ISSUE TYPE

• Bug Report

COMPONENT NAME

win_reboot

ANSIBLE VERSION

Possibly every version

[ansibot]

cc @jborean93 @jhawkesworth
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[dagwieers]

The problem translates to the win_updates module as well, when reboot: yes is used and updates may take longer than the default 1200 seconds (20 minutes) reboot_timeout setting.

[ansibot]

cc @if-meaton
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[ShachafGoldstein]

Seems like this script that checks for reboot pending machine could help in some cases
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Windows-Updates-and-684c355c

[jborean93]

It's hard to come up with a sane default, for the most count the defaults we have today seem to be fine on most servers there are just exceptions to this. This can be due to so many different factors where if we were to increase it to 1200 seconds today it still might not be enough for some people. In any case win_updates with reboot: yes actually has a default timeout of 1200 seconds to account for the load that installing updates might add to the system.

In any case if this is not enough for a user they have ways of increasing this time for their particular server.