Previously an unreadable file (e.g. /etc/ipt-firewall is 0750 after the role ran) silently produced almost empty host_vars. The script now exits with an error and writes nothing. --from-dir reads the conf files from a local directory, e.g. fetched with ansible using the vaulted become password. Add host_vars for cl-test.oopen.de (fw_manage_config: true). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>