I recently upgraded a bunch of systems from Jessie to Stretch, and as a result of that one of my hosts has started showing me a lot of noise in an hourly cron-email:

Command line is not complete. Try option "help"

I've been ignoring these emails for the past while, but today I sat down to track down the source. It was obviously coming from facter, the system that puppet uses to gather information about hosts.

Running facter -debug made that apparent:

 root@smaug ~ # facter --debug
 Found no suitable resolves of 1 for ec2_metadata
 value for ec2_metadata is still nil
 value for netmask_git is still nil
 value for ipaddress6_lo is still nil
 value for macaddress_lo is still nil
 value for ipaddress_master is still nil
 value for ipaddress6_master is still nil
 Command line is not complete. Try option "help"
 value for netmask_master is still nil
 value for ipaddress_skx_mail is still nil
 ..

There we see the issue, and it is obviously relating to our master interface.

To cut a long-story short /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/facter/util/ip.rb contains some code which eventually runs this:

 ip link show $interface

That works on all other interfaces I have:

  $ ip link show git
  6: git: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000

But not on master:

  $ ip link show master
  Command line is not complete. Try option "help"

I ninja-edited the code from this:

  ethbond = regex.match(%x{/sbin/ip link show '#{interface}'})

to:

  ethbond = regex.match(%x{/sbin/ip link show dev '#{interface}'})

And suddenly puppet-runs without any errors. I'm not 100% sure if this is a bug bug, but it is something of a surprise anyway.

This host runs KVM guests, one of the guests is a puppet-master, with a local name master. Hence the name of the interface. Similarly the interface git is associated with the KVM guest behind git.steve.org.uk.

Tags: puppet | 5 comments