Error while running /opt/vertica/sbin/install_vertica

Adam_Stepanek

I am trying to install Vertica Community Edition on my Red Hat Enterprise 6.4 server but after running /opt/vertica/sbin/install_vertica, the script ends up with the following error (I removed the hostname and the public IP addresses from the output): Error parsing validation output: Extra data&colon; line 1 column 1037 - line 1 column 1477 (char 1037 - 1477) Validation output: { "hostname":"<>", "devices":[ {"device":"/dev/sda1", "readahead":128 } ], "file_max":{ "current":783313, "suggested":65536 }, "max_map":{ "current":65530, "suggested":503308 }, "min_free_kbytes":{ "current":67584, "suggested":67584 }, "virtual_space":{ "current":"unlimited", "suggested":"unlimited" }, "max_file_size":{ "current":"unlimited", "suggested":"unlimited" }, "max_open_file":{ "current":"1024", "suggested":"65536" }, "pam_su_enabled":"false", "nics":[ {"name":"eth0", "speed":"unknown", "ipaddr":"10.0.0.11", "broadcast":"10.0.0.255", "netmask":"255.255.255.0"}, {"name":"eth4", "speed":"100", "ipaddr":"<>"", "broadcast":"<>"", "netmask":"255.255.255.0"}, {"name":"lo", "speed":"locallink", "ipaddr":"127.0.0.1", "broadcast":"255.255.255.255", "netmask":"255.0.0.0"}], "total_memory":7864, "max_user_proc":"62781", "vertica":{"brand":"vertica", "version":"6.1.2", "release":"0", "arch":"x86_64"}, "cpu_info":{ "number_of_cpus":8, "cpu_type":" Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3450 @ 2.67GHz"}} Installation completed with warnings. Installation completed with errors. Installation failed. I am completely new to Vertica. Do you have any ideas what could be the problem here? Thank you Adam

[Deleted User]

Hi Adam, Hm... The problem is, our validation script is somehow deciding that your IP address on eth4 is the string '<>"'. Which is not even a valid string here, let alone a valid IP address. This typically means that there's something unusual in the output of 'ifconfig'. So you could look at that output yourself and possibly adjust some settings on that interface if something weird is going on. It also looks like this system's hostname is a little odd? This machine is reporting that its hostname is "<>". We recommend that each machine in a Vertica cluster be configured with a valid hostname (meaning, per RFC-952 and later amendments, using only the letters a-z, numbers 0-9, and hyphens). Others may have more ideas/comments. I do know that we're aware of some issues like this in the current installer; the current released version of the installer doesn't always deal gracefully when it detects incorrect or unusual system settings. Unfortunately, for now the only workaround in the general case is to figure out what's misconfigured or configured unusually and fix it. Adam

Adam_Štěpánek

I'm sorry for being confusing. This is not the problem. I removed the real hostname and public IP addresses from the output and replaced it by the keyword "removed" inside these pointy brackets but when posting the question here, the system here somehow removed that keyword and only brackets were left. Really sorry for that. In the script, the hostname and IP addresses are definitely correct.

[Deleted User]

Ah, no problem -- certainly makes sense to replace that info. (Though the text didn't get substituted correctly, I guess?) In any case, this error does mean that something somewhere in that output is wrong. Most likely something contains an unanticipated quote or brace or somesuch, and it's not being properly escaped so the validator script can't parse the result. You could try pasting the actual unmodified output of the script into a JSON validator; for example, http://jsonlint.com/ . That might help track down the issue. (The output is generated by running "/opt/vertica/bin/validators.sh" with no arguments, if you want to get it more quickly or to verify the raw output.)

Adam_Stepanek

JSON is valid. Hm, that's weird :-( I don't understand why the script says that there is extra data from column 1037 to column 1477 because the last curly bracket is column 1037. It means that it thinks there is more data after this validation output...

Adam_Stepanek

So what do you think? Is there something I can do at this point? Or is some kind of fix coming anytime soon?

[Deleted User]

Hm... I don't know what's wrong, and haven't seen this before. Also, this doesn't happen for me; we can't reproduce it... If you're an enterprise customer, you could set up a support case; they likely have better diagnostics that they can run. You could also look to see if there's more detail in /opt/vertica/log/ (look for an installTools-*.log file there). One random thought, actually -- Vertica currently runs this script by ssh'ing around the cluster and capturing the output of each program. If your ssh configuration writes information to stdout on login/logout (even noninteractive sessions like 'ssh user@server "echo some-command"') for all users (including Vertica's dedicated 'dbadmin' user), that might cause this sort of problem? Try explicitly running 'ssh dbadmin@node2 /opt/vertica/bin/validators.sh' on your cluster (with an appropriate username and hostname); see what happens.

Adam_Stepanek

Thank you. Your comment about SSH was a spot-on :-) I would like to use Vertica in experimentations with NetFlow records as part of my university project and the server I'm using is remote so I access it through SSH. So probably that was the issue because when I explicitly ran ssh root@127.0.0.1 /opt/vertica/sbin/install_vertica, it succeeded. Looks like a possible a hint for improvement in a next version. Many thanks anyway!