Dell EMC Unity driver in cinder: Special Characters in Passwords

[Michael Boltz]

Hello OpenStack-Cinder Team,

we got a new DELL EMC Unity system xt380 with actual firmware which forces special characters for the user accounts [! , @ # $ % ^ * ? _ ~ ]. This prevents the connection from cinder volume service to the unity system and the initilization of the driver:
"Failed to initialize driver.: storops.connection.exceptions.HTTPClientError: HTTP Client Error (HTTP 401"

Check with reproduced request URL extracted from cinder logfile worked in browser flawlessly. SSL is in place and working fine (open-ssl check from cinder host as well).

Please advice how to either mask the password-charcters or to avoid putting the password in the cinder.conf
Research in the know sources (OS docu, github, inet etc.) did not succed.

br and thank you
Michael
Capgemini Germany

This bug tracker is for errors with the documentation, use the following as a template and remove or add fields as you see fit. Convert [ ] into [x] to check boxes:

- [x] This doc is inaccurate in this way: Considerations of special characters within Passwords for the DELL EMC Unity service user
- [ ] This is a doc addition request.
- [ ] I have a fix to the document that I can paste below including example: input and output.

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-----------------------------------
Release: on 2019-01-10 10:26:39
SHA: 4aa10ad54b70e44f4dfbc568b856d9b83211528f
Source: https://opendev.org/openstack/cinder/src/doc/source/configuration/block-storage/drivers/dell-emc-unity-driver.rst
URL: https://docs.openstack.org/cinder/train/configuration/block-storage/drivers/dell-emc-unity-driver.html

[Michael Boltz (tilgron)]

Hello,

this issue got quite dangling in the meantime.
Is there an update to this?
br and thank you
Michael

[Jean Pierre Roquesalane (jproque15130)]

Is this bug still relevant?

[Michael Boltz (tilgron)]

Hi,

it might be, but we have scrapped the Openstack env since we were not able to get a reliable storage-backend connection between cinder and Dell/EMC unity.
We managed to use a weak password in the unity backend and got cinder to connect to the array, but it turned out, that various disk operations (delete volumes, moving attachments between instances, mirroring etc.) caused storage connections to hang, requiring manual intervention.
Multipathing is not as stable as well, loosing paths without any trigger, creating stale assignments etc. causing nova not able to perform its tasks.

it was a nice idea to use Openstack, but it is just not reliable enough.

kr
Michael