Bug 2192940

Summary: subscription-manager commands that list a large amount of repositories piped to less outputs an error but completes
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Reporter: Benjamin Kielhold <bkielhol>
Component: subscription-managerAssignee: candlepin-bugs
Status: CLOSED MIGRATED QA Contact: Red Hat subscription-manager QE Team <rhsm-qe>
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: ---CC: ptoscano, redakkan, wpinheir
Target Milestone: rcKeywords: MigratedToJIRA, Triaged
Target Release: ---Flags: pm-rhel: mirror+
Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: If docs needed, set a value
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2023-09-22 14:11:50 UTC Type: Bug
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Benjamin Kielhold 2023-05-03 15:59:53 UTC
Description of problem:
-----------------------
Executing subscription-manager commands in relation to listing a long list of repositories piped to less on RHEL 7 or RHEL 8 with SCA enabled results with the following output if the user does not scroll to the end:


RHEL 8:
---

  # subscription-manager repos --list | less 
  Network error, unable to connect to server. Please see /var/log/rhsm/rhsm.log for more information.

  Checking /var/log/rhsm/rhsm.log, the following can be observed:
 ~~~
2023-05-03 11:34:54,608 [ERROR] subscription-manager:46708:MainThread @managercli.py:229 - exception caught in subscripti
on-manager
2023-05-03 11:34:54,608 [ERROR] subscription-manager:46708:MainThread @managercli.py:230 - [Errno 32] Broken pipe
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/subscription_manager/managercli.py", line 546, in main
    return_code = self._do_command()
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/subscription_manager/managercli.py", line 3018, in _do_command
    repo["enabled"]) + "\n")
BrokenPipeError: [Errno 32] Broken pipe
 ~~~

RHEL 7:
---

  # subscription-manager repos --list | less

 ~~~
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/subscription-manager", line 9, in <module>
    load_entry_point('subscription-manager==1.24.51', 'console_scripts', 'subscription-manager')()
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/subscription_manager/scripts/subscription_manager.py", line 86, in main
    return managercli.ManagerCLI().main()
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/subscription_manager/managercli.py", line 3070, in main
    ret = CLI.main(self)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/subscription_manager/cli.py", line 183, in main
    return cmd.main()
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/subscription_manager/managercli.py", line 545, in main
    return_code = self._do_command()
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/subscription_manager/managercli.py", line 2397, in _do_command
    repo["enabled"]) + "\n")
IOError: [Errno 32] Broken pipe

 ~~~

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
---
Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 8.7
subscription-manager-1.28.32-1.el8.x86_64

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.9
subscription-manager-1.24.51-1.el7_9.x86_64

How reproducible:
100%


Steps to Reproduce:
---
1. On a RHEL 7 or RHEL 8 server that is using subscription-manager, execute subscription-manager command piped to less that would provide a long output.

2. Exit the less early with minimal scrolling and/or none

3. Output will be presented to the user like the examples provided above



Expected results:
---
Expect if subscription-manager command is piped to less that it would close correctly and not provide a `Network error` or `Broken pipe` output.

Comment 1 Pino Toscano 2023-05-04 07:33:06 UTC
Hello,

thanks for your report, improvements on error messaging is definitely something we always want to improve.

As result of bug 1971995 in 8.8, the reported message for this situation is now the following:

  # LANG=C subscription-manager repos | less
  Connection error: Broken pipe (error code 32)

the "connection error" prefix is there because the Python exception for this (i.e. BrokenPipeError) is a subclass of ConnectionError, which represents all the connection-related issues, and as such is considered a network error. In this case it is not a network error, as the issue is that stdout is closed, and thus print() fails; the problem is that BrokenPipeError can be raisen also during network communication, and at the moment we have no way to distinguish the two situations.

That said: regardless of the "connection error" prefix, I think the (new) behaviour of printing "Broken pipe" is correct, considering what is happening; I remember "classic" Unix tools (e.g. tar) also erroring out with "broken pipe" on the same situation in the (distant?) past, although I cannot reproduce it anymore on a Fedora 38 system. If we have a way to distinguish BrokenPipeError because of socket/network issues rather than print() failing because of a closed stdout, then this could be easily done.

Comment 4 RHEL Program Management 2023-09-22 14:11:18 UTC
Issue migration from Bugzilla to Jira is in process at this time. This will be the last message in Jira copied from the Bugzilla bug.

Comment 5 RHEL Program Management 2023-09-22 14:11:50 UTC
This BZ has been automatically migrated to the issues.redhat.com Red Hat Issue Tracker. All future work related to this report will be managed there.

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