[sos-devel] Issue with 3.2 on Amazon AMI

[Bryn M. Reeves]

On Tue, 8 Dec 2015 13:34:21 -0500, Eddie Beuerlein wrote:
> Hi,
> I have downloaded the github zip file and I have been unable to get it to work.  I am tried make install, make rpm, etc.  The end result is always:

What distribution is the AMI using (i.e.: Amazon Linux, RHEL, Ubuntu
etc.)?

For RHEL or Ubuntu you are best of using the distribution provided sos
packages as these will be appropriately configured for the image's
python version and installation paths.

I do not know if Amazon includes a build of sos in their own Amazon
Linux AMIs (although it would be easy to do so as afaik it is based on
RHEL).

> $ sosreport -l
> 
> sosreport (version 3.2)
> 
> no valid plugins found

There are several possible causes for this error. With the information
about your installation it's not really possible to say definitively
which one applies:

- No policy exists for the installed operating system
  Sos uses a policy framework to detect the platform on which it is
  running and to provide access to system-specific resources such as
  package management. The plugins that can execute are tied to a
  particular policy (or set of policies) and if no policy matches then
  no plugins can run.

- There are no valid python plugin files in the sos.plugins package in
  the system defined PYTHONPATH. Normally this is something like
  /usr/lib/pythonx.y/site-packages (dist-packages on Debian / Ubuntu
  like distributions).

- An sos.conf exists that disables all valid plugins (unlikely).

At a guess I suspect your problem is the first of these: the Amazon
image doesn't contain the paths that any of the existing LinuxPolicy
classes expect so it ends up with a valid plugins list that is the empty
set.

We can fix this by creating a new policy class for this distribution -
normally this means reading the '/etc/*-release' file and matching
strings in either the file name or content - e.g. on Red Hat we look for
'/etc/redhat-release'.

If there's a '*-release' file present in your images we can start to
work on a policy if you can send the full file name and an example of
the content on your systems.

Longer-term and once we have something working you may want to ask
Amazon to include this in their builds.

Regards,
Bryn.