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Summary



Installation on Linux may fail due to a non-English locale.The error condition can be resolved by resetting the locale.

Symptoms



Installation on Linux may fail if the machine's locale is set to a language other than English.

In a specific case, for a German locale, the installation process fails with the following error:

Error: There has been an error.
Error running ifconfig | grep HWaddr : child process exited abnormally
Press [Enter] to continue :

Running ifconfig on the node displays the following:

bond0 Link encap:Ethernet Hardware Adresse x:x:x:x:x:x
inet Adresse:x.x.x.x Bcast: x.x.x.x Maske:255.255.255.0



Resolution



As evident from the error message and the ifconfig output, the installer is explicitly looking for string HWaddr, representing the MAC address. However, in the German locale, for example, this string is altered to Hardware Adresse, which causes the failure.

Use the following procedure to resolve this issue:

  1. Open the command terminal on the node and run:

    export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
     
  2. Confirm the locale is set to en_US by running:

    locale
     
  3. Run ifconfig and confirm the MAC address is represented now by HWaddr.
  4. In the same shell, run the installation.
  5. Once the installation completes successfully, reverse the locale back to its original value, using the command from step 1 with the appropriate locale value. For example, for a German locale, use:

    export LC_ALL="de_DE.UTF-8"

Note: This issue is fixed in DPX 4.2. or later