juju status bad error message on non-existent model

[Junien F]

Hi,

Using juju 2.4.5 as both controller and client, the following happens :

$ juju status -m non-existing-model
ERROR refreshing models: connection is shut down

Please display a more appropriate error message, thanks !

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

I know Anastasia has been working in this area, and some of those fixes are
in more recent 2.4 series. This may have already been fixed.

On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 10:10 AM Junien Fridrick <email address hidden>
wrote:

> Public bug reported:
>
> Hi,
>
> Using juju 2.4.5 as both controller and client, the following happens :
>
> $ juju status -m non-existing-model
> ERROR refreshing models: connection is shut down
>
> Please display a more appropriate error message, thanks !
>
> ** Affects: juju
> Importance: Undecided
> Status: New
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to juju.
> Matching subscriptions: juju bugs
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1804140
>
> Title:
> juju status bad error message on non-existent model
>
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[Anastasia (anastasia-macmood)]

The problem is that we cache model api connection on the command.

This was not an issue until our commands started to re-try calls. As far as I know, 'status' is the only special case that falls into this category. All other Juju re-tries are server-side not client-side.

This means that after the first call was made and failed, we have closed the underlying api connection but were still trying to call the controller using this closed connection in subsequent re-tries. Hence, the user gets the 'connection already shut down' error instead of the original error.

The correct, proper fix should be for the command base not to cache api connection as there is no way of knowing what the implementing commands need from it nor do we know what they'd do with it.

I am pondering if I should remove this caching altogether and will seek advice on that from higher powers. However, meanwhile the fix for this specific instance is proposed.

PR against 2.4: https://github.com/juju/juju/pull/9520

[Anastasia (anastasia-macmood)]

PR for 2.5: https://github.com/juju/juju/pull/9523