Re: Random Bracket mismatch errors

[Eric Dorland]

On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 20:27 +0100, Mark Burgess wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 14:10 -0500, Eric Dorland wrote:
> > On Sun, 2005-03-20 at 09:13 +0100, Mark Burgess wrote:
> > > Is this error reproducible? Could you get a cfagent -d0 -p dump? Is this
> > > a recent version of cfengine?
> > 
> > It is not really reproducible. I see it a few times a day from random
> > machines, but there's no real pattern to when it happens. Eric Sorenson
> > seems to think it's a threading issue (which makes sense, given the
> > somewhat random nature of this bug), so I'm going to try to build
> > without threading as soon as I figure out how to do that. 
> > 
> 
> Eric, please heed the following advice and answer the following
> questions to let me help you:
> 
> 1) Does the error come from cfservd or cfagent or where?
> 2) If the error comes from cfagent, you are wasting your time disabling
> threading. Cfagent does not use threading, This will simply be a waste
> of your time.
> 3) Tell me what version you are using and describe the error clearly and
> precisely in every detail. I need to see the offending lines of the
> config file in particular,

Of course Mark, I'm sorry if I wasn't clear before and missing
information. I'm using cfengine 2.1.13 on RHEL 3 systems, patched by
hand to remove that SIGCHLD line (only thing I touched, I swear). The
errors always look something like this:

cf:cfengine::/var/cfengine/inputs/cfagent.conf:2: Bracket mismatch, in
[class=(], level = 1
cfengine::/var/cfengine/inputs/cfagent.conf:Aborted

or

cf:cfengine::/var/cfengine/inputs/cfagent.conf:2: Bracket mismatch, in
[class=ش(], level = 1
cfengine::/var/cfengine/inputs/cfagent.conf:Aborted

The only thing that varies is the text after class= . It seems to always
contain a open or close parentheses, and sometimes a character
proceeding it.

I get this error through reports emailed to me through cfexecd, ie this
is cfagent run through cfexecd. I've never seen this problem running
cfagent by hand, but it's not very common that I would do that. It seems
to happen at random times on random machines, but it happens on everyone
of my machines (not necessarily everyday, but often enough). 

Attached is my entire cfagent.conf file, if that helps. The line 2 it's
referring to is merely "groups:" so I don't think it's the problem. 

Thanks for any and all help.

> Without this info, I simply have no context in which to guess where you
> error is occurring, I would like to help. but I need info.
> 
> best wishes
> Mark
> 

-- 
Eric Dorland
eric.dorland@mcgill.ca
WSG
514.398-5023 ext. 09562

cfagent.conf
Description: Text document