netdisco-deploy OUI data download

[mksoska]

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to install Netdisco on a Ubuntu 16.04 LTS version. Everything works as described in the installation manual, except downloading vendor MAC prefixes (OUI data) from the Internet when running the netdisco-deploy.

An error is raised at the last step, when trying to download the OUI data. Since the error is obviously perl-specific, I'm quite lost what could be the cause. Has anyone experienced a similar issue? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[rc9000]

Hi

No that's weird, I just did an installation yesterday (on SLES) and it worked just fine, so we can assume the file is ok. The error seems related to some non-ascii data getting into places it shouldn't. I played around with some LANG settings etc. to see if I can reproduce the error, but no luck.

I'd guess that maybe your Postgres DB is setup as ASCII only or some iso-8859-whatever character set that chokes on the OUI content. You can try

netdisco-do psql   
SHOW SERVER_ENCODING;
SHOW CLIENT_ENCODING;

and in the linux shell may check what LANG or any LC_ and PG... variables are set to.

BTW, Netdisco is not strict regarding Linux versions and it is most likely not part of the problem, but Ubuntu 16.04 is EOL and affected by a critical vulnerability unless you have ESM, so I'd upgrade if somehow possible.

[mksoska]

Thank you for a great tip!

I tried

netdisco-do psql   
SHOW SERVER_ENCODING;

and the output clearly showed the database uses ASCII encoding.
If anyone faces the same problem, I followed these simple steps to resolve the issue (dropped existing database and changed template1 encoding):
https://www.shubhamdipt.com/blog/how-to-change-postgresql-database-encoding-to-utf8/

Speaking about the Ubuntu 16.04, I use it only for testing purposes in a virtual environment, so the vulnerability is not crucial for me.
Again, thanks for your help.