Re: [Puppet Users] Error with service: "invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII"

jcbollinger
Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:14:47 -0000

On Monday, February 18, 2013 11:02:05 PM UTC-6, Patrick
wrote:
>
>  No, but it''s not related to the manifest. The manifest this
resource is
> in actually hasn''t changed in months. Also I can reboot the box
and it goes
> away. Other boxes that aren''t doing it will sometimes start doing
it when
> they reboot. (at least that''s the behaviour I''ve been
observing, but I have
> only rebooted a few boxes since this started occurring).
> So it seems like it''s environmental, but I have no clue what.
>

I concur.  The diagnostic messages appear to indicate that one of the
system tools Puppet is using to manage the service (probably /sbin/initctl)
fails with the given error message.  That could well mean that the
underlying init script (if any) or the daemon binary itself is failing, and
initctl is just passing on the result.

You said that the error occurs whenever you run Puppet, but you also said
it goes away if you reboot.  I''m not sure how to reconcile those.  It
may
matter, because one of the potential problem areas involves whether the
system tools return the correct response to the service''s
''status''
command.  If they don''t, then Puppet could try to start it when it is
already running, to which the service might object.

You could try to troubleshoot by running the service status, start, stop,
and restart commands manually, and seeing what happens.  Make sure to use a
shell with the minimum possible environment -- maybe just a minimal PATH --
because that''s what the agent will do.  Capture not just the behavior
and
any messages, but also the status code returned by each command.


John