Rockstor appliance reinstall (3.9 -> 4.0) fails with appliance id case change

DrC · July 21, 2021, 7:43am

Brief description of the problem

Appliance id letters changed from upper to lowercase when upgrading from 3.9 to 4.0 (same hardware)

Your licence site should probably convert to lower case (or upper) before verifying.

Detailed step by step instructions to reproduce the problem

migrated my 3.9 box to 4.0
went to activate my subscription but it failed
applance-id was the same except for letters are now lowercase
pasted appliance into appman and it worked

Web-UI screenshot

Check my appman licence entry and compare the original/current.

Error Traceback provided on the Web-UI

phillxnet · July 21, 2021, 7:30pm

@DrC Thanks for the report. Yes this is a know issue where for a while the kernel corrrectly reported in lower case, earlier CentOS used by Rockstor. Then on later CentOS versions and I think early Leap 15 there was a period where the kernel moved to incorrectly reporting the uuid as uppercase. It then, in Leap 15.2 moved back to properly reporting uuid (read procuct_id, used in Appliance ID) in lowercase.

See the following issue where we standardised to lowercase which is compliant with the uuid standard as per what we now expect (again) form the kernel:

github.com/rockstor/rockstor-core

Fake Product UUID Case Sensitivity Incorrect on Rockstor 4

opened 06:11PM - 23 Mar 21 UTC

closed 03:28PM - 09 May 21 UTC

nigel-a

It seems Rockstor 4, or rather OpenSUSE generates the same UUID but in a differe…nt case to Centos. The file /opt/rockstor/src/rockstor/system/osi.py detects the fake UUID but in a case sensitive way. This means that proper appliance IDs are not generated in RS4 for systems that present with a fake UUID. The proper fix should make the Fake UUID detection process case insensitive. An alternative fix would be to list fake uuids in both upper and lower cases. EDIT/ADDITION by @phillxnet: Please see comment: https://github.com/rockstor/rockstor-core/issues/2290#issuecomment-833792188 for context of a refinement and name change to this issue. The issue of failing to identify known fake Product uuid's was tracked down to a change in 4.17 kernels onward. Hence we fail to match now in 4 when we did in 3. But as we no longer release for CentOS we can simply change our known fake uuid's over to lower case. We thus have 2 issues here; fake uuid detection, and Rockstor 3/4 appliance ID case change: upper/lower respectively. This issue is being considered as focused on the first of these. Appman can 'fix' the second via it's Appliance ID edit capability. Linking to the associated forum thread for this issue: https://forum.rockstor.com/t/duplicate-appliance-ids-generated/7723/14

and it’s associated pull request:

github.com/rockstor/rockstor-core

Fake Product UUID Case Sensitivity Incorrect on Rockstor 4 (#2290)

rockstor:master ← phillxnet:2290_Fake_Product_UUID_Case_Sensitivity_Incorrect_on_Rockstor_4

opened 08:16PM - 06 May 21 UTC

phillxnet

+16 -23

As Rockstor 4 is associated with newer kernel versions by default, which in turn… now produce lowercase product uuid's, we fail in some cases to match against our mixed case tuple of know fake product uuids. Fixes #2290 @FroggyFlox Ready for review. Fix by normalising on lowercase in line with the sited uuid standard of: rfc4122 as per the kernel. Includes formatting clean-ups of the known fake product uuids. N.B. no functional change is made to how an existing install, of the same major version, generates it's Appliance ID.

As always the problem has a few more angles than are initially obvious. If we allow both cases then we have 2 valid machines per subscription. Plus we have, as you see, the case of matching/catching fake product uuid’s from manufactures.

At least now, from the issue referenced kernel changes we can be assured that the problematic period of uppercase is now over and we have again returned to the ‘proper’ lowercase scenario. Another element in this is that our earlier subscribers will not face this problem as they registered with kernels that correctly reported as lower case. So this only affects our later subscribers for a period of a year or two I think.

All a little tricky, but if you read the issue text and pull request you can see the direction we took. Essentially returning to what was correct when we first set-out on the subscriptions, which was a few years ago now.

So yes, we have a known caveate that for a time some subscriptions were incorrectly upper case and if those folks then upgrade to Rockstor 4 they have to correct the case within Appman.

We could probably do with a doc issue to explain that cases sensitivity is a thing in Appman and if one is using an uppercase Appman Appliance ID it needs to be lower cased, as you have done.

Thanks again for the report. Much appreciated. And well done for finding the solution via Appman. We should probably have the Stable subscription dialog within the Rockstor Web-UI state case is sensitive and to check this within Appman if a code fails to active a new Rockstor 4 subscription.

All would be fine however if the subscription was established with an earlier Rockstor 3 (we have many lower case examples from that period), but later Rockstor 3’s suffer from this situation. So 6 of one and half a dozen of the other was what I was faced with when addressing this issue. Along of course with sorting out the recognition of the fake product uuids.

Bit by bit.

Hope that helps to explain our situation in more detail on that one.