unable to run any juju commands

[james beedy]

$ juju clouds --debug
internal error, please report: running "juju" failed: cannot create transient scope: DBus error "System.Error.E2BIG": [Argument list too long]

I don't know how to get through this error, or get any other information about what is going on here. Other users on the same system do not experience the error.

I'll keep digging.

[Heather Lanigan (hmlanigan)]

Perhaps a red herring: the same error has occurred with microk8s.kubectl commands as well: https://www.gitmemory.com/issue/ubuntu/microk8s/2194/825407891. No long term solution was found.

What versions of juju and ubuntu are you using?

[Pen Gale (pengale)]

This feels like either a snap issue, or a global dbus issue to me.

Do other commands on the box work? Is it running out of space, or ram? Does rebooting the machine and/or restarting the dbus services w/ systemctl work?

Is this reproducible across systems, or just happening w/ a juju client on a specific computer?

[james beedy (jamesbeedy)]

Other commands work, `juju` even works for other users on the box. I haven't been able to reproduce this in any other environment.

strace juju --help

http://paste.ubuntu.com/p/CbZ5kQdJf3/

[james beedy (jamesbeedy)]

$ snap info juju | grep installed
installed: 2.8.10 (15845) 74MB classic

$ lsb_release -a
LSB Version: core-9.20170808ubuntu1-noarch:printing-9.20170808ubuntu1-noarch:security-9.20170808ubuntu1-noarch
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS
Release: 18.04
Codename: bionic

[james beedy (jamesbeedy)]

We have a second occurrence of this issue now.

@heitorpbittencourt

[Heitor (heitorpbittencourt)]

Happening to me now, same machine as @jamesbeedy.

Any juju command fails with the same error, even those that do not exist:

$ juju --version
internal error, please report: running "juju" failed: cannot create transient scope: DBus error "System.Error.E2BIG": [Argument list too long]
$ juju blablabla
internal error, please report: running "juju" failed: cannot create transient scope: DBus error "System.Error.E2BIG": [Argument list too long]
$ juju status
internal error, please report: running "juju" failed: cannot create transient scope: DBus error "System.Error.E2BIG": [Argument list too long]

Using juju 2.9 from latest/stable

[Heitor (heitorpbittencourt)]

I deleted the file ~/.ICEAuthority, logged out and in again, and now juju is working.

[Pen Gale (pengale)]

It looks like this was an issue w/ tools elsewhere in the system, so going to mark as invalid for now. Feel free to re-open if you suspect that Juju is doing something that make this issue more likely, or if it appears to be a frequent issue that Juju should perhaps implement a workaround for.

[james beedy (jamesbeedy)]

+1, thank you!

[Heitor (heitorpbittencourt)]

This is happening again to me. And also happened a few weeks ago. Any Juju command gives the same error:

$ juju status
internal error, please report: running "juju" failed: cannot create transient scope: DBus error "System.Error.E2BIG": [Argument list too long]

Juju snap 2.9.17

[Heitor (heitorpbittencourt)]

This time I don't have the ~/.ICEAuthority file.

Can we reopen this issue for further investigation?

[Heitor (heitorpbittencourt)]

I'm hitting this bug again.

This time I removed the ~/.ICEAuthority file but it did not fix the problem. I can't run any juju command.

Juju snap 2.9.19

[Heitor (heitorpbittencourt)]

Yay! Just got back from vacation and this bug hit me again.

Who do I contact to give some priority to fix this?

[Linda Guo (lihuiguo)]

Hi

I am hitting this bug too. Can someone look into the bug further? thanks

~$ juju models
internal error, please report: running "juju" failed: cannot create transient scope: DBus error "System.Error.E2BIG": [Argument list too long]
~$ juju controllerrs
internal error, please report: running "juju" failed: cannot create transient scope: DBus error "System.Error.E2BIG": [Argument list too long]
$ snap list |grep juju
juju 2.9.27 18573 latest/stable canonical* classic
juju-wait 2.8.4~2.8.4 96 latest/stable stub classic

$ ls ~/.ICEAuthority
ls: cannot access '/home/jujumanage/.ICEAuthority': No such file or directory

[Ian Booth (wallyworld)]

Besides microk8s (https://bugs.launchpad.net/juju/+bug/1926192/comments/1), this also has been reported as happening here

https://github.com/Rigellute/spotify-tui/issues/784

So it seems something unrelated to juju directly and perhaps caused by snap infrastructure.

[Ian Booth (wallyworld)]

I've made a post to the snapcraft forum to ask about the issue

https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/dbus-error-system-error-e2big-error/29227

[Ian Booth (wallyworld)]

There's been a reply from a snap developer to the forum question raised above.

Next time it happens, can you get the requested data and reply to that thread.

<quote>
The /usr/bin/snap sends a request to systemd --user instance to create a transient scope for it. Basically a dbus call to org.freedesktop.systemd1 on session bus, method org.freedesktop.systemd1.Manager.StartTransientUnit with arguments: 0, unit name, "fail", {"PID", <pid>}, nil, where unit name is snap.<uuid>.scope, eg. snap.ohmygiraffe.ohmygiraffe.2ce67290-4b94-44cc-a189-65df5c0f0fc5.scope. I don’t know why it comes back with E2BIG, perhaps you can capture dbus traffic with busctl --user monitor and then we’ll be able to tell more.

FWIW /usr/bin/snap only sends out a request, but the handling is actually in systemd. What I see though, is that Ubuntu 18.04 is a common thing for all the bug reports linked here, so maybe something there
</quote>

[Juliana Karoline de Sousa (julianaklulo)]

Hello,

I'm having the same issue.

$ juju status
internal error, please report: running "juju" failed: cannot create transient scope: DBus error "System.Error.E2BIG": [Argument list too long]
internal error, please report: running "juju" failed: cannot create transient scope: DBus error "System.Error.E2BIG": [Argument list too long]
internal error, please report: running "juju" failed: cannot create transient scope: DBus error "System.Error.E2BIG": [Argument list too long]

Tried deleting the ~/.ICEAuthority file but it didn't help.

Any updates on this?

[Juliana Karoline de Sousa (julianaklulo)]

Ran the command mentioned in #17 and got this:

$ busctl --user monitor
Monitoring bus message stream.
‣ Type=method_call Endian=l Flags=0 Version=1 Priority=0 Cookie=1
  Sender=:1.201423 Destination=org.freedesktop.DBus Path=/org/freedesktop/DBus Interface=org.freedesktop.DBus Member=Hello
  UniqueName=:1.201423
  MESSAGE "" {
  };

‣ Type=method_return Endian=l Flags=1 Version=1 Priority=0 Cookie=1 ReplyCookie=1
  Sender=org.freedesktop.DBus Destination=:1.201423
  MESSAGE "s" {
          STRING ":1.201423";
  };

‣ Type=signal Endian=l Flags=1 Version=1 Priority=0 Cookie=402696
  Sender=org.freedesktop.DBus Path=/org/freedesktop/DBus Interface=org.freedesktop.DBus Member=NameOwnerChanged
  MESSAGE "sss" {
          STRING ":1.201423";
          STRING "";
          STRING ":1.201423";
  };

‣ Type=signal Endian=l Flags=1 Version=1 Priority=0 Cookie=2
  Sender=org.freedesktop.DBus Destination=:1.201423 Path=/org/freedesktop/DBus Interface=org.freedesktop.DBus Member=NameAcquired
  MESSAGE "s" {
          STRING ":1.201423";
  };

‣ Type=method_call Endian=l Flags=0 Version=1 Priority=0 Cookie=2
  Sender=:1.201423 Destination=org.freedesktop.systemd1 Path=/org/freedesktop/systemd1 Interface=org.freedesktop.systemd1.Manager Member=StartTransientUnit
  UniqueName=:1.201423
  MESSAGE "ssa(sv)a(sa(sv))" {
          STRING "snap.juju.juju.1d69ab4e-7c6d-4a53-8c86-1751ae2014bc.scope";
          STRING "fail";
          ARRAY "(sv)" {
                  STRUCT "sv" {
                          STRING "PIDs";
                          VARIANT "au" {
                                  ARRAY "u" {
                                          UINT32 20414;
                                  };
                          };
                  };
          };
          ARRAY "(sa(sv))" {
          };
  };

‣ Type=method_call Endian=l Flags=0 Version=1 Priority=0 Cookie=1049556
  Sender=:1.1 Destination=org.freedesktop.DBus Path=/org/freedesktop/DBus Interface=org.freedesktop.DBus Member=GetConnectionUnixUser
  UniqueName=:1.1
  MESSAGE "s" {
          STRING ":1.201423";
  };

‣ Type=method_return Endian=l Flags=1 Version=1 Priority=0 Cookie=459316 ReplyCookie=1049556
  Sender=org.freedesktop.DBus Destination=:1.1
  MESSAGE "u" {
          UINT32 115268091;
  };

‣ Type=error Endian=l Flags=1 Version=1 Priority=0 Cookie=1049557 ReplyCookie=2
  Sender=:1.1 Destination=:1.201423
  ErrorName=System.Error.E2BIG ErrorMessage="Argument list too long"
  UniqueName=:1.1
  MESSAGE "s" {
          STRING "Argument list too long";
  };

‣ Type=signal Endian=l Flags=1 Version=1 Priority=0 Cookie=5
  Sender=org.freedesktop.DBus Destination=:1.201423 Path=/org/freedesktop/DBus Interface=org.freedesktop.DBus Member=NameLost
  MESSAGE "s" {
          STRING ":1.201423";
  };

‣ Type=signal Endian=l Flags=1 Version=1 Priority=0 Cookie=402697
  Sender=org.freedesktop.DBus Path=/org/freedesktop/DBus Interface=org.freedesktop.DBus Member=NameOwnerChanged
  MESSAGE "sss" {
          STRING ":1.201423";
          STRING ":1.201423";
          STRING "";
  };

[Diko Parvanov (dparv)]

Same here, restarted the machine that had this problem and it started working again.