CloudLinux VM not recognized

I've encountered a CloudLinux VM that distro is unable to recognize:

$ distro
Name: 
Version: 
Codename: 
$ python -c 'import distro; print(distro.linux_distribution())'
('', '', '')

The problem is that none of the normal search strategies work:

$ which lsb_release
/usr/bin/which: no lsb_release in (...)
$ ls /etc/*release
ls: cannot access /etc/*release: No such file or directory
$ ls /etc/*version
ls: cannot access /etc/*version: No such file or directory
$ uname -a
Linux web.illinois.edu 3.10.0-962.3.2.lve1.5.24.9.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Feb 13 08:24:50 EST 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 3.10.0-962.3.2.lve1.5.24.9.el7.x86_64 (mockbuild@buildfarm02.cloudlinux.com) (gcc version 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-36) (GCC) ) #1 SMP Wed Feb 13 08:24:50 EST 2019

The only strategy that seems to work is:

$ hostnamectl
   Static hostname: web.illinois.edu
         Icon name: computer-vm
           Chassis: vm
           Boot ID: 5b5b8c522ccd4974808f192aea001491
    Virtualization: kvm
  Operating System: CloudLinux 7.6 (Vladimir Lyakhov)
       CPE OS Name: cpe:/o:cloudlinux:cloudlinux:7.6:GA:server
            Kernel: Linux 3.10.0-962.3.2.lve1.5.24.9.el7.x86_64
      Architecture: x86-64

We may need to add another search strategy to support this type of VM.

@adamjstewart

Hey @adamjstewart, do you know where the CPE is provisioned in such an environment ?
Thanks, bye 👋

What is a CPE?

Common Platform Enumeration, look at hostnamectl output.
I'll do some research on my own soon.

Hostnamectl output is attached above. Is there something else you need from me?

So we are looking for OperatingSystemPrettyName and OperatingSystemCPEName D-Bus attributes (see sources).

If we can manage to fetch them without reading from the bus (maybe they are provisioned on the file system too ?), we could then implement a trivial CPE parser and extract information from there.

I recursively grepped the entire OS for those strings but didn't find anything useful. Maybe it would be easier to build a hostnamectl parser?

Thanks for trying this.
hostnamectl --json=short could make this straightforward.

Maybe we are missing something, and others got a better idea ?
Another way would be to read from D-Bus directly... A Python dependency is required though.
See you 👋

This version of hostnamectl doesn't have a --json option.

So re.search around hostnamectl output, or something like dcar if we want to stop calling binaries directly in the future.

Coming to join the conversation here as my issue #368 was basically a duplicate.

Happy to help test any potential solutions on my GoDaddy CloudLinux 8 server. As discussed in my issue hostnamectl is not available in that environment.

@NebularNerd

Hello again @NebularNerd !

We can start by checking whether the above "D-Bus way" works in your environment too.

bustctl is another systemd binary but if you have it, could you run : busctl get-property org.freedesktop.hostname1 /org/freedesktop/hostname1 org.freedesktop.hostname1 OperatingSystemPrettyName ?
If it isn't, could you give a try to dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.hostname1 /org/freedesktop/hostname1 org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.Get string:org.freedesktop.hostname1 string:OperatingSystemPrettyName ?

Thanks ! Bye 👋

@NebularNerd

Hello again @NebularNerd !

We can start by checking whether the above "D-Bus way" works in your environment too.

bustctl is another systemd binary but if you have it, could you run : busctl get-property org.freedesktop.hostname1 /org/freedesktop/hostname1 org.freedesktop.hostname1 OperatingSystemPrettyName ? If it isn't, could you give a try to dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.hostname1 /org/freedesktop/hostname1 org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.Get string:org.freedesktop.hostname1 string:OperatingSystemPrettyName ?

Thanks ! Bye 👋

Hi @HorlogeSkynet 🙂

bustctl and dbus-send are a bust, both are not available
This looks to affect Cloud Linux 7 as well Incorrect platform for CloudLinux OS prisma/orm#13977 (comment)
From this page it implies that beyond the uname output not much else exists for this platform.

What a shame... I wonder whether we should opt for a simpler approach like checking for /usr/sbin/cloudlinux-selector presence, and hope for upstream to properly include an os-release (or any other indicative) file. What do you think ? 🙄

Note : this wouldn't give us the version, nor the "pretty name".

EDIT : if we wanna stick to the D-Bus way (and if we cannot manage to directly retrieve what D-Bus queries), we have to come up with a first Python script to dialog with D-Bus if you don't have any system tool to do so 🤡

@NebularNerd

Hello @NebularNerd ! Could you please take a look/give a try to #369 RFC ? 🙂
Thanks bye 👋

Tested #369 on the GoDaddy 🥔 server and we have a winner 🎉

{
    "codename": "",
    "id": "cloudlinux",
    "like": "",
    "version": "8",
    "version_parts": {
        "build_number": "",
        "major": "8",
        "minor": ""
    }
}

Awesome, we only have to wait for @python-distro/maintainers to properly review #369 then 🙂
Many thanks for your time and resources Andy, see you 👋

Add support for CloudLinux VM missing os-release and /etc/redhat-release

CloudLinux VM 6 is dead, long live CloudLinux VM 9: https://cloudlinux.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/5743930542620-CloudLinux-OS-life-cycle

@HorlogeSkynet

@HorlogeSkynet I think it would be wise to adopt an official policy of only fixing bugs for versions of OSes that are still supported. That can easily end a lot of debates.

I think it would be wise to adopt an official policy of only fixing bugs for versions of OSes that are still supported. That can easily end a lot of debates.

I second that.

prefer redirecting to upstream distributions patches, to honor existing datasources and their format
downstream (simple) patches for non-EOL distributions

For reference, this issues was partially related to #262.

Add `systemd-hostnamed` fallback for missing os-release

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HorlogeSkynet commented on Feb 5, 2022

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HorlogeSkynet commented on Feb 6, 2022

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