I’ve written a playbook that provisions some server infrastructure, however one of the steps is to change the hostname.

A common headache when changing the hostname on a Linux machine is that if the hostname you set for the machine, isn’t in the machine’s /etc/hosts file, then when you run sudo su or su, it takes a really long time before it shows you the prompt as the machine struggles to do a DNS lookup for it’s own hostname and fails,

This becomes an even bigger problem when you’re using Ansible to setup these machines, Ansible times out when changing the hostname;

Simple fix, edit the /etc/ansible/ansible.cfg file and include

# SSH timeout
timeout = 300

And that’s it.