perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Michael Johnson <>]

Hi Victor,

We have a fix for this bug, and it will be released in the upcoming 3.4.2 release, which should be out soon. 

In the meantime, be very careful that your config does not have special characters in the description -- that it what causes it. Typically it is either a single or double quote that causes the issue: ' or " although \ or other characters could potentially be a problem. 

Since you're describing the backslashes growing at both ends of the 
description, I suspect your description is wrapped in quotes.


This would cause a problem:
description "some description here"

This would be safe:
description   some description here

If you're still unsure feel free to send the actual description line from 
your config and we can double-check it.

Here is the issue in our tracker:

https://code.google.com/p/perfsonar-ps/issues/detail?id=1014

Thanks,
Michael

On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 11:56:39AM +0000, Victor Olifer wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I came across a strange behaviour of perfsonar regular testing  - after a 
> while (maybe a couple of weeks since a new test was configured) the 
> destination description field of a regular owamp test starts  filling with 
> backslashes '\' from both ends of the description text - and the number of 
> backslashes grows exponentially every day until the regular_testing.conf file 
> size (together with log files) exhausts the disk size (50GB in my case) - 
> after which perfsonar crashes of course.
>
> The regular_testing.conf looks like:
>
> [root@perfsonar
>  etc]# head -c 350 regular_testing.conf
> <test>
>    local_interface   p3p1
>    <parameters>
>        test_ipv4_ipv6   1
>        type   powstream
>    </parameters>
>    <target>
>        address   192.168.121.2
>        <override_parameters>
>            type   powstream
>            force_ipv4   1
>        </override_parameters>
>        description   \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ... (some text like 
> "with 192.168.121.2 via private" in the middle) .. \\\\\\\\\\"
>
> I use version 3.4.1 (3.4.1-1.pSPS) of the toolkit with the automatic updates 
> on.
>
> Actually, it happened with my perfsonar server for the second time; when it 
> happened  the first time I just cleaned the enormous conf and log files and 
> restarted perfsonar after which it started working. I used no special symbols 
> for the description filed. Now when it happened again I think it needs some 
> attention and help.
>
> Please advise me what can be done to prevent such strange crashes.
>
> Thanks,
> Victor
>
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--
Michael Johnson
GlobalNOC Software Engineering
Indiana University

812-856-2771

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