Running Ansible task throws shared connection closed error - xpath

Question

I have written a task for ansible-xml module.
- name: Learning xml module
xml:
file: /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/sme/WEB-INF/sme-servlet.xml
xpath: //ref/[#abcd="test"]
I am getting the following Error :
failed: [xxxx] => {"failed": true, "parsed": false}
BECOME-SUCCESS-ezlukfdsowbhzcovltxcovwmgbziywxu
OpenSSH_6.6.1, OpenSSL 1.0.1f 6 Jan 2014
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug1: /etc/ssh/ssh_config line 3: Applying options for *
debug1: auto-mux: Trying existing master
debug1: mux_client_request_session: master session id: 2
Shared connection to xxxx closed.

Answer 1

By default, ansible adds some options which override ssh_config options. Specifically, it adds:
-o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPersist=60s -o ControlPath="/home/user/.ansible/cp/ansible-ssh-%h-%p-%r"
Figured that out by using -vvv with ansible-playbook.
How to fix:
You can override those options by specifying ssh_args in the [ssh_connection] section of your .ansible.cfg as specified here. Changing ssh_args doesn't actually change all of the args because Ansible also passes -C -tt -v -o KbdInteractiveAuthentication=no -o PreferredAuthentications=gssapi-with-mic,gssapi-keyex,hostbased,publickey -o ConnectTimeout=10 and other options (e.g. -o PasswordAuthentication=no -o User=root), some of which are simply immutable defaults, and some of which depend on variables you've specified in the playbook.