I recently upgraded some servers, and on reboot I ran into the peculiar condition where I received the following warning:
fatal: [user] => Authentication or permission failure. In some cases, you may have been able to authenticate and did not have permissions on the remote directory. Consider changing the remote temp path in ansible.cfg to a path rooted in "/tmp". Failed command was: mkdir -p $HOME/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1401973086.25-185293296215162 && echo $HOME/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1401973086.25-185293296215162, exited with result 1
I followed the instructions I found on Changing Ansible Temporary Directory, as it has worked for many others. I had to turn on verbose logging but I still couldn’t see the issue. After running the command manually I got the following error
mkdir: cannot create directory '.ansible': Disk quota exceeded`
Basically, when I restarted my servers the grpquota and usrquota commands in /etc/fstab took effect. I’m not sure why they were on as we have restarted these servers on other occasions and they were not there. While I have these servers scheduled for a restart, to remove the quotas, and add noatime, I’ve simply turned off the quotas using quotaoff /