Comment 10 for bug 1792343

i debugged this issue in the reproducer environment and found that when os-net-config was configuring the network configuration on the overcloud node, this was causing ssh to drop the connection:

Since we have ssh retries set to 8 in ansible.cfg, ansible would retry the task since it was failed by a ssh connection error.

However, the first task was actually still running and it eventually succeeds.

The second task that was kicked off by ansible as a retry, sees that the deployment is already applied, but the notification file (*.notify.json) does not yet exist since the first task is still in progress. This causes the second task to fail with the error reported in the bug and the whole ansible-playbook run to then fail.