vCloud Usage Meter 4.5 Upgrade - Error(908) Command line option is invalid: --skipdigest

2022-03-29T00:00:00+02:00

Again a interesting bug, this time during the In-Place Upgrade of a VMWare vCloud Usage Meter from Version 4.4 to 4.5, which shouldn't be a big deal based on the official Upgrade Guide (Archive: [1], [2]).

Running bash /root/upgrade/upgrade-um.sh ended in:

Error(908) : Command line error: option is invalid.
No such option: --skipdigest. Please use /usr/bin/tdnf --help
Upgrade fail during JRE update. Please, revert to latest snapshot and prior update execute 'tdnf clean cache'.`

I followed all steps exactly as described in the Guide so how is it possible that the Upgrade Script triggers tdnf with unavailable options? Couldn't find anything related / similar in the VMWare KB, GitHub and a good old Google / DuckDuckGo Search.

Based on our internal documentation, we installed the Usage Meter a while back in Version 4.1 and upgraded to 4.4 a year ago, probably there was also a 4.2 and / or 4.3 upgrade before.

The result of tdnf --version was a quite outdated version tdnf: 1.2.3 which seem to be released around mid of 2017, but option --skipdigest was part of a commit (Archive: [1], [2]) on April 12 2019.

vCloud Usage Meter is running on VMware Photon OS, just another Linux Distribution with yum as package manager and attached online repositories. So let's just try to update tdnf manually via yum update tdnf:

Upgrading:
rpm-libs          x86_64      4.14.3-1.ph3      photon-updates      937.03k 959523
rpm               x86_64      4.14.3-1.ph3      photon-updates      356.38k 364930
hawkey            x86_64      2017.1-8.ph3      photon-updates      150.05k 153656
tdnf-cli-libs     x86_64      3.1.8-1.ph3       photon-updates       70.18k 71864
tdnf              x86_64      3.1.8-1.ph3       photon-updates      309.71k 317139

Total installed size:   1.78M 1867112

Is this ok [y/N]: y

Looks good, installation of version tdnf: 3.1.8 was successful, a quick test, which ended earlier in the same Error(908) as above, worked this time, so obviously this version is new enough to know the option --skipdigest:

tdnf update --skipdigest vmware-jre

Afterwards I could just follow the Guide from VMWare to perform the In-Place Upgrade to Version 4.5 without any further issues. I assume something went wrong during earlier Upgrades and tdnf was never updated after the initial Installation. Earlier Upgrade Scripts probably didn't used the --skipdigest option, so it was undetected until now.

All this would explain why no one else seem to hit that bug, was probably a rare edge case limited to our Environment.

openSUSE Leap 15.3 on VMware vSphere 6.7: Get Guest Customization working

2022-03-10T00:00:00+01:00

Technically openSUSE Leap 15.3 is equal to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3, both share the same code and binary packages, the only difference is community vs. commercial support. It's even possible to quickly migrate from Leap 15.3 to SLES 15 SP3 (Archive: [1], [2]) if you decide vendor support is preferred at a later point.

VMWare still doesn't officially support Leap 15.3 as VM on vSphere neither allows Guest Customization, but for sure, when you run SLES 15 SP3 it's not a problem and fully supported?!

As explained here (Archive: [1], [2]) in regards to Leap 15.2, one option is to replace to content of /etc/issue with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15.

Keep in mind that /etc/issue is a symlink to /run/issue, a volatile and temporary file, managed by systemd service issue-generator. So you have to remove the symlink and create a new /etc/issue file, otherwise your changes will be lost after the next reboot.

sudo rm /etc/issue && echo "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15" > /etc/issue

In addition I had to change the OS Type in the VM Settings on vSphere to "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15" as well, otherwise the Guest Customization couldn't even be started without an error message.

I like the generated issue file and the additional information, so after the new deployed VM is up and running, let's just revert the change:

sudo rm /etc/issue && ln -s /run/issue /etc/issue

Little more complicated, but also possible, is to replace /etc/os-release with the content from a SLES 15 SP3 System. It has the same effect as changing /etc/issue, the Guest Customization will think it's a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and apply all settings.

NAME="SLES"
VERSION="15-SP3"
VERSION_ID="15.3"
PRETTY_NAME="SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3"
ID="sles"
ID_LIKE="suse"
ANSI_COLOR="0;32"
CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:suse:sles:15:sp3"

The Wombelix Post - vSphere

vCloud Usage Meter 4.5 Upgrade - Error(908) Command line option is invalid: --skipdigest

openSUSE Leap 15.3 on VMware vSphere 6.7: Get Guest Customization working