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Ansible playbook is broken for AIX

Open richardlau opened this issue 1 month ago • 0 comments

As part of working towards using clang, @abmusse and I got together to thrash out Ansible changes to install clang on AIX. Unfortunately we quickly discovered issues trying to run the playbooks for AIX that are unrelated to any modifications we were adding:

  • Some already (yum) installed package has an upgrade that when installed breaks yum. AIX Toolbox now recommends dnf over yum.
  • One (or more) updated packages require OpenSSL 3. We've documented manual steps for this (as OpenSSL is managed by installp and not yum/dnf). Annoyingly the packaging has changed for the tarballs (there's no longer a top level directory).
  • Ansible does not detect dnf on AIX. We've been able to work around it by explicitly setting pkg_mgr with ansible.builtin.set_fact.
  • The Ansible dnf task needs python3-dnf (installable via dnf) but on AIX 7.2 this is a 32-bit package that requires us to run Ansible on the AIX machine in /opt/freeware/libexec/python3 (instead of /usr/bin/python3) as that is the 32-bit one (as opposed to 64-bit).
  • When using dnf, Ansible fails to find gcc10-c++ (even when already installed on the system) which causes the playbook to fail. Running dnf on the command line does find the package and it's only this package (of the ones we are installing today) that has this issue. We need gcc 10 for Node.js 20 and 22.

richardlau avatar Nov 21 '25 15:11 richardlau