EX294 · domain
Manage task execution and roles
Practise Red Hat Certified Engineer EX294 Manage task execution and roles practice questions — original exam-style scenarios with answer choices, explanations, and analysis of common mistakes.
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Manage task execution and roles questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.
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Common Manage task execution and roles exam traps
- ▸Answering from memory before reading the full scenario.
- ▸Missing a constraint such as cost, availability, security, scope or command context.
- ▸Choosing a broad answer when the question asks for the most specific fix.
- ▸Ignoring why the wrong options are tempting.
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All Manage task execution and roles questions (68)
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An Ansible playbook includes multiple roles. The administrator wants to ensure that a specific role's tasks are executed before any other roles, even if the roles are listed in a different order in the playbook. Which approach should be used?
Medium2Refer to the exhibit. The administrator observes the output and is concerned because the 'Check on async job' task shows 'finished: 0'. What does this indicate?
Hard3An administrator is designing a role that needs to execute a set of tasks conditionally based on whether a package is installed. Which approach is best practice?
Hard4Refer to the exhibit. A role 'timezone' sets the timezone twice to different values. The role also depends on 'ntp'. After running a playbook that applies this role to server1, what is the timezone on server1?
Medium5Refer to the exhibit. A playbook uses the 'webserver' role. The administrator runs the playbook and notices that the firewall configuration is not applied as expected. What is the most likely cause?
Hard6A team is writing an Ansible role to configure a web server. They want to include default variables that can be easily overridden by playbook variables. Which directory and file should they use to define these variables?
Medium7An administrator wants to run a playbook that executes tasks in parallel across multiple hosts but wants to limit the number of simultaneous hosts to 5. Which directive should be set?
Medium8Refer to the exhibit. An administrator runs the playbook but the wait_for task fails. What is the most likely cause?
Hard9Match each systemd unit type to its description.
Medium10An administrator is debugging a playbook that uses multiple roles and wants to limit execution to a specific set of tasks. Which three methods can be used to filter task execution? (Choose three.)
Hard11Which THREE are valid methods to control task execution in Ansible?
Hard12A playbook includes a long-running task that should not block the rest of the playbook. The administrator wants to start the task and later check its status. Which method should be used?
Hard13An administrator wants to use an Ansible role from Ansible Galaxy but the role has a dependency on another role that is already installed. What should be done to avoid conflicts?
Medium14During a playbook execution, a task that uses the 'ansible.builtin.copy' module fails with 'Permission denied' on a remote host. The playbook runs as user 'ansible' which is a sudoer without password. Which of the following is the most likely cause and solution?
Hard15Which two statements are true regarding Ansible roles? (Choose two.)
Easy16Which TWO statements about Ansible role defaults are true?
Hard17An Ansible playbook fails intermittently due to a service not starting in time. The administrator wants to configure a task to retry until the service confirms it is running. Which Ansible feature should be used?
Hard18A playbook needs to load encrypted variables from a file vault.yml. The vault password is stored in a file vault-pass with restricted permissions. Which method securely loads the variables when running the playbook?
Easy19Your organization uses Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) to manage job execution. You have created a job template that runs a playbook to configure application servers. The playbook uses a custom credential to access a remote database. Recently, the job started failing with 'Authentication failed' when connecting to the database. You have verified that the database credentials are correct. The credential in AAP is of type 'Machine' and is assigned to the job template. The playbook uses the 'mysql_db' module. Which step should you take to troubleshoot and resolve the issue?
Medium20An administrator has a requirements.yml file specifying roles from multiple sources: a public Galaxy server, a private Git repository, and a local path. They want to install all roles into the roles directory of the current project. Which command will achieve this?
Hard21What is the purpose of the 'meta: flush_handlers' task?
Easy22What is the purpose of the 'vars' keyword under the httpd role inclusion?
Easy23Refer to the exhibit. When the playbook runs on target1, which value will nginx_port have in the role?
Medium24An administrator wants to define role dependencies. In which file should they place the dependencies declaration?
Hard25A playbook uses a loop to create multiple users. The administrator notices that if one user creation fails, the entire playbook stops. Which directive should be used to continue executing remaining iterations?
Medium26Refer to the exhibit. The playbook runs successfully. What will the debug task output?
Medium27An administrator has a playbook with tasks tagged 'install', 'configure', and 'service'. There are no untagged tasks. They want to run only the tasks tagged 'install' and 'configure', skipping 'service'. Which three commands will achieve this? (Choose three.)
Medium28Refer to the exhibit. The administrator wants to run a playbook that installs a package on all webservers. Which command will use the existing configuration and inventory correctly?
Medium29Which directive in an Ansible playbook ensures that a task runs only on the first host in a batch, and results are applied to all hosts?
Easy30A team develops a custom Ansible role 'webserver' that depends on another role 'common'. They want to ensure that when 'webserver' is used, 'common' is automatically installed from the same Galaxy server. Which approach should they use?
Medium31Refer to the exhibit. The administrator defines a default variable 'db_port' in the role's defaults/main.yml. However, the playbook sets 'db_port: 3307' as a role parameter. After running the playbook, what is the value of 'db_port' on the target host?
Medium32Which TWO of the following statements about Ansible roles are correct?
Medium33A DevOps engineer wants to run an Ansible playbook inside a specific execution environment (EE) that includes custom collections. The EE image is stored in a private registry requiring authentication. The engineer has configured a container credential file. Which command will execute the playbook using the EE and the credential file?
Medium34What is the most likely cause of the failure?
Hard35A playbook includes multiple roles. The administrator wants to skip a specific role during execution. Which technique should they use?
Easy36An Ansible playbook needs to ensure a service is enabled and running on boot. Which combination of parameters should be used with the 'systemd' module?
Easy37Drag and drop the steps to configure a logical volume (LV) using LVM on a new disk in the correct order.
Medium38A playbook uses ansible.builtin.import_playbook to include other playbooks. The administrator needs to pass variables to the imported playbook. Which approach is valid?
Hard39Refer to the exhibit. An administrator runs a playbook in check mode and receives the shown output. What should be done to fix the failure while maintaining idempotency?
Hard40Refer to the exhibit. An administrator runs an Ansible playbook and receives the error shown. The playbook uses a variable 'vault_httpd_port' that should be stored in an encrypted vault file. Which step should the administrator take first to resolve the issue?
Hard41An Ansible playbook that installs packages and configures services is not idempotent. Which two practices should be implemented to make it idempotent? (Choose two.)
Easy42In an Ansible playbook, the 'strategy' parameter is set to 'free'. What behavior does this strategy produce?
Easy43Which TWO elements can be used to include external task files in a playbook?
Easy44Refer to the exhibit. A playbook already includes the 'common' role in its roles list. The current role depends on 'common' with 'allow_duplicates: false'. How many times will the 'common' role run?
Easy45You are managing a web application deployment using Ansible. The application requires a specific version of a library (libapp) to be installed on all web servers. Your current playbook uses the role 'web' which includes a task to install libapp version 1.2. However, after a recent update, the role's defaults now specify libapp version 2.0, but you must keep version 1.2 for compatibility. You have defined a variable 'lib_version' in the playbook's vars section with value '1.2'. The role's task uses the variable 'libapp_version' (not 'lib_version'). The play fails because 'libapp_version' is undefined. What is the best way to resolve this issue without modifying the role?
Easy46Which THREE directives can be used to modify loop behavior in Ansible?
Medium47A developer wants to reuse a set of tasks that conditionally include other task files based on variables defined per host. Which method should be used to ensure the included tasks are evaluated per host at runtime?
Hard48Your team uses ansible-pull to manage configuration of a large number of remote nodes. Each node is configured to pull the latest playbook from a Git repository every 30 minutes. Recently, some nodes started reporting 'ERROR! the role 'base' was not found'. The playbook depends on roles from a requirements.yml file that is stored in the same repository. The ansible-pull command on each node uses the default roles path (~/.ansible/roles). The Git repository contains the requirements.yml file but does not contain the actual role directories. What is the most likely cause and solution?
Medium49An administrator wants to ensure a role's tasks are executed only on certain hosts. Which approach should they use?
Easy50You are responsible for managing a large fleet of web servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. You have an Ansible playbook that deploys a custom web application. The playbook uses several roles from Ansible Galaxy and includes tasks that require root privileges. Recently, users reported that the deployment fails intermittently with the error 'Timeout (12s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt'. You suspect that the issue is related to the become method and the SSH connection. The current inventory uses 'ansible_user: deploy' and 'ansible_become: yes' with default settings. The 'deploy' user has sudo privileges with NOPASSWD for all commands. However, the timeout occurs only on high-latency connections. Which change would most effectively resolve the timeout issue?
Hard51Which TWO statements about Ansible roles are true?
Medium52You need to run an Ansible playbook every hour to update a dynamic inventory file from a CMDB API. The playbook is stored in /opt/ansible/update_inventory.yml. You want to schedule the execution using a cron job on the control node. The control node runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. The playbook uses Ansible Vault to decrypt API credentials, and the vault password is stored in /etc/ansible/.vault_pass. Which cron entry will execute the playbook hourly?
Easy53An Ansible role has a complex dependency tree. The administrator wants to ensure that dependencies are installed before the main role tasks. Which file should be used to define dependencies?
Medium54Refer to the exhibit. The administrator runs the playbook with the 'deploy' tag, but all tasks are skipped. What is the most likely reason?
Hard55A team is automating server configuration using Ansible. They have a custom role 'security' that updates firewall and SSH settings. They notice that when they apply the role to multiple hosts, the SSH configuration changes sometimes fail because the firewall blocks the SSH port before the SSH configuration is updated. They need to ensure that SSH configuration is updated first, then firewall rules are applied. They have defined both tasks in the same role. What should they do?
Easy56Refer to the exhibit. An Ansible playbook task fails with 'Missing sudo password'. The playbook runs against a server where the remote user 'admin' has sudo privileges but requires a password. Which configuration change would resolve this issue?
Easy57An administrator sees this output during a playbook run. What can they conclude?
Medium58Which ansible.cfg setting controls the number of parallel forks for task execution?
Easy59Which best practice should be followed when using Ansible to manage task execution across multiple hosts?
Easy60Refer to the exhibit. The administrator notices that the handler 'restart httpd' runs even though the httpd service was already running. Which change would ensure the handler only runs if the service configuration changes?
Hard61A systems administrator needs to run a playbook that installs packages on a group of managed nodes. The playbook should run only on nodes that are part of the 'web_servers' group in the inventory. Which approach is best practice?
Easy62Refer to the exhibit. The playbook uses the 'yum' module to install 'httpd' on a RHEL 8 system. Which of the following is the most likely cause of the failure?
Hard63A team has developed several roles that share common variables. They want to organize these variables in a central file. Where should they place this file so it is automatically loaded by all roles?
Hard64An Ansible playbook uses the 'block' and 'rescue' directives. Which two statements are true about this construct? (Choose two.)
Medium65You are managing a fleet of 50 RHEL 8 servers that host a critical web application. Your Ansible control node runs RHEL 8 with Ansible 2.9. The application requires a specific package 'app-pkg' that is only available from a private YUM repository. The repository is configured on each server via a role 'repo_config'. Recently, after a security update, the repository GPG key was changed. Now, when you run the playbook to install 'app-pkg' on all servers, it fails on some servers with the error: "GPG check FAILED: key ID mismatch". On other servers, the installation succeeds. All servers have the same OS version and are configured identically via the same role. The playbook uses the 'yum' module with 'state: present'. You verify that the GPG key file on the control node is the correct new key and that the role copies it to the servers. What is the most likely cause and the best course of action?
Hard66Which TWO statements about Ansible roles are correct?
Medium67Refer to the exhibit. An administrator runs an Ansible playbook and gets an unreachable error. The administrator has set ansible.cfg as shown. Which configuration change would most likely resolve the issue?
Hard68A playbook uses roles with default variables. The administrator needs to override a default variable for a specific role only when that role is used. Which method should be used?
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