[chef] Re: Re: Re: Sorting bug?

[Jay Feldblum < >]

Jason,

The key order in Ruby 1.8 depends on the hashes of the keys. But as of Ruby 1.8.7-p357, the algorithm for computing hashes was changed. The algorithm used to be constant, but now it is seeded with a new seed computed each time the Ruby VM starts up. See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2011-4815 .

Cheers,

Jay

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 10:39 PM, Jason J. W. Williams < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

We're also seeing it in another template that's converting an array to a string:

mynetworks = <%= @my_networks.join(", ") %>

The code generating mynetworks is here: https://gist.github.com/4036561

Again, we've never had this issue before with this code either. I'm curious why we're only seeing this problem now on a new node, and not when we were developing these cookbooks, or for the months they've been running.

-J

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 7:25 PM, Jason J. W. Williams < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

They may not preserve ordering when adding/removing items are involved, but absent anything changing in the hash, we haven't seen them change. These cookbooks have been running for months with no problem (and continuing with no problem on the other nodes).

-J

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 7:20 PM, AJ Christensen < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Hashes don't preserve ordering in Ruby 1.8.7

I'd suggest installing and using Chef with the Omnibus Installers, this will give you a modern Ruby environment (1.9.3-p194 or similar)

Cheers,

AJ

On 8 November 2012 16:03, Jason J. W. Williams < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

So we set up a new Chef client (10.16.2) from scratch  and we've noticed some interesting behavior:

Any cookbook that relies on iteration over a list of any sort now returns random ordering of the list between runs with no change in the underlying data.

For example the following data:

default[:testapp][:languages] = {"US" => "ASCII",

                                               "JP" => "utf-8"}

When inserted into a file with this template code:

[Languages]

<% for language in node[:testapp][:languages].keys-%>

<%=language%>:<%=node[:testappanguages][language]%>

<% end-%>

Sometimes generates:

[Languages]

JP:utf-8

US:ASCII

And other times generates:

[Languages]

US:ASCII

JP:utf-8

Again nothing has changed between runs in the underlying data, cookbooks or roles. This doesn't affect any of our existing nodes (we noticed it but multiple apps on the new node were intermittently and restarting for no reason). Also downgrading the affected node to Chef 0.10.8 or 10.14.2 (the versions we run on the other nodes) doesn't help.

Ruby version is 1.8.7 across the board. Unaffected nodes are running Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS, the affected node is running 10.04.4 LTS.

Any ideas what may be causing this?

-J