Can't activate changes - ASCII ERROR

Owned by Anastasios Thomaidis
Last updated: Nov 20, 2024 by Matthew Hierholzer

Receiving error during Activating Changes. Error "Internal automation error: The text must only contain ASCII characters."

LAST TESTED ON CHECKMK 2.3.0P1

Table of Contents

Problem

This happens when a filename contains a non-ASCII character somewhere within a site's ~/local directory. This prevents the central site from being able to replace the contents of ~/local on the remote sites. 

Screenshot of got invalid data error while trying to activate changes.


Non ASCII Character List

Non ASCII Characters


Solution

We must find the file containing the invalid characters to correct this behavior.


  1. As the site user, within the command line on your central site, go to your site users ~/local folder. 

    OMD[mysite]:~$ cd ~/local

    .

  2. Run the following two commands:

    OMD[mysite]:~/local$ find . -type f | xargs ls -ltr |grep --color='auto' -P -n "[^\x00-\x7F]"
OMD[mysite]:~/local$ find . -type f | grep --color='auto' -P -n "[^\x00-\x7F]"

    .

    In this example, the above commands located a file named bad_filξ_namξ.txt which the non-ASCII character is the ξ.

    OMD[mysite]:~/local/share/doc/check_mk$ bad_filξ_namξ.txt

    .

  3. This file must be deleted, and then changes must be activated again. After all sites have been activated, this issue should be resolved.