cloud-config.service is failing with a unicodedecodeerror

[Lars Kellogg-Stedman]

With 0.7.8 on a CentOS 7 environment, I am seeing cloud-init fail (when called from cloud-config.service) with the following traceback:

  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cloudinit/stages.py", line 785, in _run_modules
      freq=freq)
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cloudinit/cloud.py", line 70, in run
      return self._runners.run(name, functor, args, freq, clear_on_fail)
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cloudinit/helpers.py", line 199, in run
      results = functor(*args)
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cloudinit/config/cc_locale.py", line 37, in handle
      cloud.distro.apply_locale(locale, locale_cfgfile)
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cloudinit/distros/rhel.py", line 135, in apply_locale
      rhel_util.update_sysconfig_file(out_fn, locale_cfg)
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cloudinit/distros/rhel_util.py", line 37, in update_sysconfig_file
      (exists, contents) = read_sysconfig_file(fn)
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cloudinit/distros/rhel_util.py", line 64, in read_sysconfig_file
      return (exists, SysConf(contents))
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cloudinit/distros/parsers/sys_conf.py", line 61, in __init__
      write_empty_values=True)
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/configobj.py", line 1242, in __init__
      self._load(infile, configspec)
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/configobj.py", line 1302, in _load
      infile = self._handle_bom(infile)
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/configobj.py", line 1457, in _handle_bom
      if not line.startswith(BOM):
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

This looks like it is ultimately a bug with the 'configobj' module (CentOS 7 has 4.7.2). The following reproduces the failure:

  import configobj
  import cloudinit.util

  contents = cloudinit.util.load_file('/etc/locale.conf').splitlines()
  cfg = configobj.ConfigObj(contents, interpolation=False, write_empty_values=True)

This only happens when 'contents' is a unicode string. If we call .encode() on the string first, everything works correctly:

  import configobj
  import cloudinit.util

  contents = cloudinit.util.load_file('/etc/locale.conf').encode('utf-8').splitlines()
  cfg = configobj.ConfigObj(contents, interpolation=False, write_empty_values=True)

[Joshua Powers (powersj)]

Hi! Thanks for taking the time for filing a bug.

There has been significant work on the CentOS/RHEL support in the newest version of cloud-init. If you are willing and able, it would be great if you could try the latest version from our COPR repo:

https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/g/cloud-init/cloud-init/

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for cloud-init because there has been no activity for 60 days.]