UserPreferences

ApplicationNotes/CfEngine

1. cfengine Notes

1.1. Solved Problems

1.1.1. Intermittent SIGPIPE / Authentication Problems

I had problems like this periodically: 

cfengine:: Received signal 13 (SIGPIPE) while doing [pre-lock-state]
cfengine:: Logical start time Thu Jun  3 09:00:05 2004
cfengine:: This sub-task started really at Thu Jun  3 09:00:05 2004
cfengine:: Received signal 13 (SIGPIPE) while doing [pre-lock-state]
cfengine:: Logical start time Thu Jun  3 09:00:05 2004
cfengine:: This sub-task started really at Thu Jun  3 09:00:05 2004
cfengine:: Received signal 13 (SIGPIPE) while doing [pre-lock-state]
cfengine:: Logical start time Thu Jun  3 09:00:05 2004
cfengine:: This sub-task started really at Thu Jun  3 09:00:05 2004
cfengine:: Challenge response from server rheingold.nakedape.priv/192.168.1.1 was incorrect!
cfengine:: Authentication dialogue with rheingold.nakedape.priv failed

The problem is that I had cfexecd running out of cron at the beginning of every hour and scheduled in daemon mode to run at the beginning of every half hour. I also had no SplayTime set. I noticed the times I was receiving the error was always at the beginning of the hour, which happens to be when I had it doubly scheduled. I've changed the daemon scheduled time to run at x:15 and x:45 and the problem has gone away entirely.

1.2. Persistent SIGPIPE Problems

I have also seen SIGPIPE errors when I manual killed a running cfagent which was performing a long process during a bootstrap. After rebooting and removing all the various databases on the client machine running cfagent, I continued to receive SIGPIPE errors like those above. The solution was to restart cfservd on the server--the server itself was maintaining state information about the client which was not cleaned up due to my abnormal termination of the client. This was with 2.1.14.