New Foreman install...getting error about rendering json

Support
1

Just stood up foreman on a CentOS 7 box in AWS. When I log into the web UI, I’m seeing errors about:

Failed to apply catalog: Could not render to json: source sequence is illegal/malformed utf-8

This is my first trial of foreman, so I’m not familiar with the tool or with Puppet. Trying to see if this will be a solution for us to manage our heterogeneous Linux infrastructure.

Any help with this error would be appreciated.

Thanks!

2

Hi,
could you provide a bit more information? What foreman version do you have? Is the whole UI down and the error is the only thing you can see? Are there any errors in /var/log/foreman/production.log?

3

I’m using Foreman 1.16.1. The web UI is running and I can log in, but when I log in, it shows that the foreman server is getting errors every 30 minutes. When I drill down, that’s where I’m getting the error:

Failed to apply catalog: Could not render to json: source sequence is illegal/malformed utf-8

I get the same error from running ‘puppet agent -t’ from the command line.

I do not see anything in the production.log that appears to be an error.

4

I’m also working with AWS support as what little info I’ve been able to find on this has pointed toward the EC2 user-data being gzipped. I have confirmed that the user-data is, in fact, gzipped and I can’t even view it from the EC2 console.

My guess is that this is the root of the issue, so I will post whatever info is relevant as I find out more. In the meantime, if someone can beat AWS support to the punch, there are always bragging rights for that.

5

I stood up a new EC2 instance outside of OpsWorks. Apparently, OpsWorks adds user-data and gzips it (hence it is binary) which seems to cause this issue.

Also, the installation instructions I had been following referenced specific versions of the various yum repos. For the ones I could do so, I changed the specified version in the URL path to “latest” (instead of, for example, “1.15”).