Hung agent processes

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug in Ubuntu.

Unfortunately its not possible to upgrade the version of puppet in Ubuntu 12.04; if its possible to identify what was causing this issue and what the fix in puppet was this could be fixed through the Stable Release Update process.

I have seen this as well on 12.04 with just simple "puppet apply".

Looking through 2.7.12's changelog I see a few things that *might* be it. including:

c5d3825 (#11740) Wait on the handle from the PROCESS_INFORMATION structure
4f493a3 (#12564) Stub CHILDSTATUS in all test cases, not just failure cases

Either way, lets call this Confirmed for now, but I think it may prove to be fixed already in quantal.

Have run into this quite a few times now on precise. Its really quite dangerous as puppet just randomly seems to fail.

I've looked through the changelog of puppet 2.7.12 and can't find any obvious reason this doesn't happen, so the next step is likely to find a reliable reproducer (tough, probably a race) and then bisect it.

Thanks James & Clint for your answers.

I would like to add some details:

Currently, as a temporary solution, we use crontab to kill the process at 00h00 and start again at 00h01. With that, we are sure that the agent works every days.

With my co-worker, we have updated a server (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) which had the stable version (2.7.11) with the version of quantal (2.7.18, we used pin preferences for that), and we have the same problem.. Nothing wrong in syslog

For example, saturday, the last execution of the puppet was at 07h00 AM, and the next at 00h00 sunday (thanks to crontab)..

I hope this information can help you..!

Regards

Adrien

The upstream bug should actually be http://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/10418. The originally referenced one is a duplicate.

Might also be bug #995719. Can you try remove process_name.rb ?