Error: undefined method `<' for :undef:Symbol at <line of one of my modules>

[Fabien Delpierre]

Hi folks,
First off, let me underline that I'm completely new to Puppet. I'm an intermediate Chef user but just changed jobs, and the new place is a Puppet shop and I've never touched Puppet in my life. I have not had time to acclimatize to it at all, but today my coworker asked me to make some changes to running servers. Gotta start somewhere. My being a newbie also means I'm not sure what information to give you but I'll try my best.

In addition, we use Vagrant for local testing before pushing to servers, this is where the trouble occurs -- during Vagrant provisioning.
We're using this box: http://puppet-vagrant-boxes.puppetlabs.com/centos-64-x64-vbox4210.box (CentOS 6.4)
As far as I can tell, it ships with Puppet 3.1.1.
The host computer -- my laptop -- is OS X 10.10.4, if it matters, and I'm using VirtualBox 5.0.
Also using the following Vagrant plugins: vagrant-cachier 1.2.1, vagrant-librarian-puppet 0.7.1 and vagrant-share 1.1.3.
Right now I can't use a newer version of the librarian plugin because it causes another, completely unrelated error. 0.7.1 is the version my coworker uses.

During the Puppet run, I get the following error:
==> centos6: Error: undefined method `<' for :undef:Symbol at /tmp/vagrant-puppet/modules-0082ff7071bbf237d9411fcd54aae93c/profile/manifests/my_module.pp:29 on node foo.bar.com

This is the corresponding chunk of code:

if $::operatingsystemmajrelease < 7 {
  monit::foo { $webservice:
    app_port    => hiera("${webservice}::http_port",undef,"foo/common"),
    app_uri     => hiera("${webservice}::app_uri",undef,"${webservice}/common"),
  }
} else {
  include systemd_mon
  systemd_mon::register { $webservice:
    unit => $webservice,
  }
}

Line 29 is the first one above. We have some CentOS 7 in the infrastructure so we need to handle it differently since CentOS 7 switched to systemd, as you probably know, hence the above chunk of code.

It looks good to me, and my coworker, who is much more experienced with Puppet, also sees nothing wrong with it. Of course that works on his machine, so it sounds to me like nothing is indeed wrong with the code, but rather with something on my machine, but then again, the error occurs during the Puppet run inside the VM so I'm not sure how my machine would affect it. My coworker is stumped and obviously I don't know where to start.

All I could find through Google was this: https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/8783
But it's an ancient ticket and it doesn't look like the same problem, even though it's the same error, so I doubt this is helpful.

Could anybody please suggest something to start troubleshooting this? Thanks!

[Hunter Haugen]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 11:21 AM Fabien Delpierre <fabien.d...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi folks,
First off, let me underline that I'm completely new to Puppet. I'm an intermediate Chef user but just changed jobs, and the new place is a Puppet shop and I've never touched Puppet in my life. I have not had time to acclimatize to it at all, but today my coworker asked me to make some changes to running servers. Gotta start somewhere. My being a newbie also means I'm not sure what information to give you but I'll try my best.

In addition, we use Vagrant for local testing before pushing to servers, this is where the trouble occurs -- during Vagrant provisioning.
We're using this box: http://puppet-vagrant-boxes.puppetlabs.com/centos-64-x64-vbox4210.box (CentOS 6.4)
As far as I can tell, it ships with Puppet 3.1.1.

Ooo, old.

 

The host computer -- my laptop -- is OS X 10.10.4, if it matters, and I'm using VirtualBox 5.0.
Also using the following Vagrant plugins: vagrant-cachier 1.2.1, vagrant-librarian-puppet 0.7.1 and vagrant-share 1.1.3.
Right now I can't use a newer version of the librarian plugin because it causes another, completely unrelated error. 0.7.1 is the version my coworker uses.

During the Puppet run, I get the following error:
==> centos6: Error: undefined method `<' for :undef:Symbol at /tmp/vagrant-puppet/modules-0082ff7071bbf237d9411fcd54aae93c/profile/manifests/my_module.pp:29 on node foo.bar.com

This is the corresponding chunk of code:

if $::operatingsystemmajrelease < 7 {

A minimal use case shows that if $::operatingsystemmajrelease is undef (puppet's idea of nil) then this will happen, because you can't compare undef with comparators. (I include --trace just to show it really is the puppet manifest `<` and not a ruby method `<`)

[root@q2xuk1zrzaqpy3f ~]# puppet --version

3.1.1

[root@q2xuk1zrzaqpy3f ~]# puppet apply -e 'if $whatever < 5 {}' --trace

Error: undefined method `<' for :undef:Symbol at line 1 on node q2xuk1zrzaqpy3f.delivery.puppetlabs.net

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/parser/ast/comparison_operator.rb:28:in `send'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/parser/ast/comparison_operator.rb:28:in `evaluate'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/parser/ast.rb:62:in `safeevaluate'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/parser/ast/ifstatement.rb:20:in `evaluate'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/parser/ast.rb:62:in `safeevaluate'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/parser/ast/astarray.rb:25:in `evaluate'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/parser/ast/astarray.rb:20:in `each'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/parser/ast/astarray.rb:20:in `evaluate'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/parser/ast.rb:62:in `safeevaluate'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/resource/type.rb:136:in `evaluate_code'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/parser/resource.rb:81:in `evaluate'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/parser/compiler.rb:282:in `evaluate_main'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/parser/compiler.rb:96:in `compile'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/parser/compiler.rb:29:in `compile'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/indirector/catalog/compiler.rb:83:in `compile'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/util.rb:184:in `benchmark'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/indirector/catalog/compiler.rb:81:in `compile'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/indirector/catalog/compiler.rb:41:in `find'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/indirector/indirection.rb:191:in `find'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/application/apply.rb:204:in `main'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/application/apply.rb:146:in `run_command'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/application.rb:364:in `run'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/application.rb:456:in `plugin_hook'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/application.rb:364:in `run'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/util.rb:504:in `exit_on_fail'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/application.rb:364:in `run'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/util/command_line.rb:132:in `run'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/lib/puppet/util/command_line.rb:86:in `execute'

/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/puppet-3.1.1/bin/puppet:4

Simple workaround is to check that the variable has a value before comparing it:

[root@q2xuk1zrzaqpy3f ~]# puppet apply -e 'if $whatever and $whatever < 5 {}'

Notice: Finished catalog run in 0.20 seconds

But... $operatingsystemmajrelease is totally a valid fact on centos6 and facter 1.7.6 that I get when gem installing puppet 3.1.1:

[root@q2xuk1zrzaqpy3f ~]# facter --version

1.7.6

[root@q2xuk1zrzaqpy3f ~]# facter operatingsystemmajrelease

6

So what version of facter does your vagrant box have? It looks like 1.6 does NOT have this fact, and thus the variable will be undef.

HTH

 

  monit::foo { $webservice:
    app_port    => hiera("${webservice}::http_port",undef,"foo/common"),
    app_uri     => hiera("${webservice}::app_uri",undef,"${webservice}/common"),
  }
} else {
  include systemd_mon
  systemd_mon::register { $webservice:
    unit => $webservice,
  }
}

Line 29 is the first one above. We have some CentOS 7 in the infrastructure so we need to handle it differently since CentOS 7 switched to systemd, as you probably know, hence the above chunk of code.

It looks good to me, and my coworker, who is much more experienced with Puppet, also sees nothing wrong with it. Of course that works on his machine, so it sounds to me like nothing is indeed wrong with the code, but rather with something on my machine, but then again, the error occurs during the Puppet run inside the VM so I'm not sure how my machine would affect it. My coworker is stumped and obviously I don't know where to start.

All I could find through Google was this: https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/8783
But it's an ancient ticket and it doesn't look like the same problem, even though it's the same error, so I doubt this is helpful.

Could anybody please suggest something to start troubleshooting this? Thanks!

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[Fabien Delpierre]

On Thursday, July 16, 2015 at 3:05:49 PM UTC-4, Hunter Haugen wrote:

A minimal use case shows that if $::operatingsystemmajrelease is undef (puppet's idea of nil) then this will happen, because you can't compare undef with comparators. (I include --trace just to show it really is the puppet manifest `<` and not a ruby method `<`)

[root@q2xuk1zrzaqpy3f ~]# puppet --version

3.1.1

[root@q2xuk1zrzaqpy3f ~]# puppet apply -e 'if $whatever < 5 {}' --trace

Error: undefined method `<' for :undef:Symbol at line 1 on node q2xuk1zrzaqpy3f.delivery.puppetlabs.net

...

Simple workaround is to check that the variable has a value before comparing it:

[root@q2xuk1zrzaqpy3f ~]# puppet apply -e 'if $whatever and $whatever < 5 {}'

Notice: Finished catalog run in 0.20 seconds

But... $operatingsystemmajrelease is totally a valid fact on centos6 and facter 1.7.6 that I get when gem installing puppet 3.1.1:

[root@q2xuk1zrzaqpy3f ~]# facter --version

1.7.6

[root@q2xuk1zrzaqpy3f ~]# facter operatingsystemmajrelease

6

So what version of facter does your vagrant box have? It looks like 1.6 does NOT have this fact, and thus the variable will be undef.

 
Thanks, that's helpful and a reasonable explanation. Is Facter similar to Chef's Ohai? Anyway, it looks like this Vagrant box has Facter 1.6.18. I'll have to double check with my coworker that he is indeed using the same Vagrant box, but since we're getting our Vagrantfile from the same Chef repo, I doubt he'd have a different version, and yet he doesn't have the issue when running a $ vagrant provision. He's out today but I'll follow up with him as soon as possible.