perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Mark Feit <>]

Jon Clausen writes:

    In /var/log/messages I would see:
    
    Aug  4 09:44:21 dk-ore-pstp01 powstream[31833]:
    OWPControlOpen([fi-csc-pstp01-mi1.nordu.net]:861): Couldn't open 'control'
    connection to server: No route to host
    
    Now, I *know* the routing works, so this had me scratching my head for a
    while, until I decided that the logged message was 'wrong'.
    
    As it turns out, the firewall on fi-csc-pstp01 was dropping the traffic.
    
    Now, I *think* this classifies as a bug, because the logged info is 
actively
    misleading. But it's going to be a while before I'd be able to identify
    which component to report the bug against.

Connections rejected for administrative reasons get lumped in with the “no 
route to host” error returned by the kernel.  All that comes back is a number 
that gets mapped to that string, and there aren’t separate errors for 
anything more specific than that.  I agree that the message is a bit 
misleading in this situation, but it does fit in a “no way to get there” sort 
of way even if it’s not the routing.  If you’d tried connecting to 
fi-csc-pstp01-mi1.nordu.net:861 with anything else (telnet, nc, etc.) while 
that port was blocked, you’d have got the same error.

Any changes to make the message more accurate and informative would have to 
take place in the kernel and the C library.  As you might have guessed, we 
don’t maintain either and are bound by their behavior.  :-)


    Maybe, actually, a couple of pointers on how to submit bug reports?
    
Asking on the perfsonar-users is a good start.  If you’re positive you’ve 
found a bug, you can also drop us a line directly on the perfsonar-developers 
list.  The perfSONAR project on GitHub (https://github.com/perfsonar) is 
divided up into many sub-projects, each with its own issue tracker, so I 
don’t recommend submitting bugs directly there unless you know which 
component is the problem.

HTH.

--Mark