Known Issue: ndtrack may crash with segmentation fault while gathering inventory on Ubuntu 18 on a KVM hypervisor (IOJ-2190770)

[#1]

Summary

ndtrack processes may crash with a segmentation fault when running on a Ubuntu 18.x virtual machine on a KVM hypervisor.

The following output may be observed when running ndtrack interactively:

$ ./ndtrack -t Machine
Relink `/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1' with `/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librt.so.1' for IFUNC symbol `clock_gettime'
Segmentation fault

Details

This error occurs when the ndtrack process attempts to generate an agent ID value for an Ubuntu 18.x virtual machine running on a KVM hypervisor.

Inspection of logging in tracker.log files will show logging finishing with lines like the following:

[Fri 26 Nov 2021 08:09:24 AM CET (G, 0)] {16103} Finished tracking cloud service provider metadata
[Fri 26 Nov 2021 08:09:24 AM CET (G, 0)] {16103} Finished tracking hardware

This error is only known to occur on Ubuntu 18.x. Other major versions of Ubuntu are not affected.

Workarounds & mitigation

The error output from the Ubuntu system suggests linking shared libraries in the /lib directory as follows which avoids this error occurring:

$ ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librt.so.1

Use caution when making system changes like this as possible side effects may be difficult to identify.

The error can be avoided by setting the inventory agent preference PerformKvmInventory to false to avoid detecting KVM hypervisor details in inventory. For example:

$ ./ndtrack -t Machine -o PerformKvmInventory=false

Fix status

This issue has been fixed in the following FlexNet Manager Suite releases: 2022 R1.3 / Jul 2022 (Cloud), 2022 R2 (On Premises)

Other information

Affected components: Agent, Containers, Inventory

Master issue ID: IOJ-2190770

Also known as: FNML-75805