[chef] Re: Re: 0.10 web UI gives connection refused error when drilling into cookbooks.

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 2:17 PM, Jason J. W. Williams wrote:

> The problem is restrictive permissions on /tmp, causing
> chef-server-webui to be unable to write temporary files containing the
> syntax highlighted versions of recipe files. The error the web UI
> shows " "Connection refused - Connection refused connecting to
> localhost:4000" is misleading...it's not a connection issue it's a
> writing temp files issue.
> 
> -J
> 
There is a bug in net/http in the version/patchlevel of ruby you're using 
where it sets a variable to nil and then calls `closed?` on it. In the vast 
majority of cases (but not all, as you've encountered), this bug is triggered 
by connection refused, so Chef covers up the NoMethodError with connection 
refused. That is:

1. An exception is raised inside a code block where chef is reading the body 
(or attempting to read) of the http response.
2. The net/http library calls nil.closed? inside its error handling/cleanup 
logic. This hides the error raised in step 1.
3. Chef sees the NoMethodError caused by this bug, but doesn't know what the 
error from step 1 was. So it raises connection refused which is usually the 
cause of this behavior. Chef matches very specifically on the exception class 
and message so other errors are no "rewritten" in this way.

I'm not happy with this behavior, but it's an improvement over the previous 
behavior. Of course, both improvements to Chef's workaround, and efforts to 
get the patch for this bug accepted to upstreams are welcome.

# http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/2708
# http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/2758

-- 
Dan DeLeo 
> On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 2:38 PM, Jason J. W. Williams
> <
 
>  
> (mailto:
 )>
>  wrote:
> > Hoepfully, this is the last 0.10 upgrade problem I encounter. The web
> > UI seems to work for every function except for drilling into a
> > specific cookbook. It can list the cookbooks, nodes, data bags etc.
> > And it can drill into any item that isn't a cookbook (node/data
> > bag/role etc.). However, when I click on any cookbook's version link
> > in the cookbook listing I get this error after a long wait time:
> > 
> > "Connection refused - Connection refused connecting to localhost:4000
> > for /cookbooks/apache2/0.99.3/files/c66fdf0bd066835aeb4de9eb8d10915f,
> > giving up"
> > 
> > I've checked the webui.pem file on the server and that seems to be
> > working since every other part of the web UI is functional. Also, I
> > can connect on the server to localhost:4000. So I'm a bit confused as
> > to what's going on. The webui and server logs aren't very helpful.
> > 
> > -J