Support for non-standard known_hosts file location

[cisco-abrandel]

SUMMARY

Add the ability to specify an additional custom file to check for known_hosts, via a variable.

ISSUE TYPE

• Feature Idea

COMPONENT NAME

network_cil

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Imagine I have Ansible working via a Jenkins agent, with everything specified in a Jenkinsfile, and a known_hosts file checked into source control. I don't want to worry about a bunch of state needing to pre-exist on the Jenkins agent(s), so being able to point Ansible to the custom known_hosts file checked into source control (and therefore dropped as part of the checkout in Jenkins) would be great.

[Qalthos]

So first, network_cli has no host key checking of its own, we let paramiko_ssh handle all of that for us instead of trying to reinvent it. So to this issue as written, if you want it fixed you should open an issue against the paramiko_ssh connection at https://github.com/ansible/ansible.

All that aside, we are rewriting network_cli to not use paramiko anymore, for a variety of reasons. This is a valuable feature request that we would like to keep in mind as we move forward. So I am going to keep this issue open to account for that, and not a whole lot is going to happen to it for a while. Once the libssh feature work is in review, I'll come back to this and make sure it gets resolved.