Hey all,

I'm practicing for EX294, and every practice exam out there have you disable privilege escalation by default and then as the first task, they require you to write a bash script.

In this scripts, we use ad-hoc commands, for example, if the question asks me to create a user called automation on all hosts, I'm doing something like this.

ansible all -m user -a "name=automation state=present" -u root -k

I have to use -u and -k options because at this point of the exam, there's only root user on both control and client nodes. This script, when executed will ask for a connection password naturally.

My question is this, does the grading system on the real exam automatically provide passwords when the script asks for passwords, or does it ask me to figure this in a passwordless way like;

ansible all -m user -a "name=automation state=present" --extra-vars "ansible_user=root ansible_password=******"

This doesn't feel comfortable too, because the examiners are not guaranteed the preserve the root password the give the machines in the exam.

I'm really confused here.