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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

A local OS error occurred while connecting to a device

A local OS error occurred while connecting to a device

When running ANTA, you can receive A local OS error occurred while connecting to <device> errors. The underlying OSError exception can have various reasons: [Errno 24] Too many open files or [Errno 16] Device or resource busy.

This usually means that the operating system refused to open a new file descriptor (or socket) for the ANTA process. This might be due to the hard limit for open file descriptors currently set for the ANTA process.

At startup, ANTA sets the soft limit of its process to the hard limit up to 16384. This is because the soft limit is usually 1024 and the hard limit is usually higher (depends on the system). If the hard limit of the ANTA process is still lower than the number of selected tests in ANTA, the ANTA process may request to the operating system too many file descriptors and get an error, a WARNING is displayed at startup if this is the case.

Solution

One solution could be to raise the hard limit for the user starting the ANTA process. You can get the current hard limit for a user using the command ulimit -n -H while logged in. Create the file /etc/security/limits.d/10-anta.conf with the following content: 

<user> hard nofile <value>
The user is the one with which the ANTA process is started. The value is the new hard limit. The maximum value depends on the system. A hard limit of 16384 should be sufficient for ANTA to run in most high scale scenarios. After creating this file, log out the current session and log in again.

Timeout error in the logs

Timeout error in the logs

When running ANTA, you can receive <Foo>Timeout errors in the logs (could be ReadTimeout, WriteTimeout, ConnectTimeout or PoolTimeout). More details on the timeouts of the underlying library are available here: https://www.python-httpx.org/advanced/timeouts.

This might be due to the time the host on which ANTA is run takes to reach the target devices (for instance if going through firewalls, NATs, …) or when a lot of tests are being run at the same time on a device (eAPI has a queue mechanism to avoid exhausting EOS resources because of a high number of simultaneous eAPI requests).

Solution

Use the timeout option. As an example for the nrfu command:

anta nrfu --enable --username username --password arista --inventory inventory.yml -c nrfu.yml --timeout 50 text

The previous command set a couple of options for ANTA NRFU, one them being the timeout command, by default, when running ANTA from CLI, it is set to 30s. The timeout is increased to 50s to allow ANTA to wait for API calls a little longer.

ImportError related to urllib3 when running ANTA

When running the anta --help command, some users might encounter the following error:

ImportError: urllib3 v2.0 only supports OpenSSL 1.1.1+, currently the 'ssl' module is compiled with 'OpenSSL 1.0.2k-fips  26 Jan 2017'. See: https://github.com/urllib3/urllib3/issues/2168

This error arises due to a compatibility issue between urllib3 v2.0 and older versions of OpenSSL.

Solution

  1. Workaround: Downgrade urllib3

    If you need a quick fix, you can temporarily downgrade the urllib3 package:

    pip3 uninstall urllib3

pip3 install urllib3==1.26.15

  2. Recommended: Upgrade System or Libraries:

    As per the [urllib3 v2 migration guide](https://urllib3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/v2-migration-guide.html), the root cause of this error is an incompatibility with older OpenSSL versions. For example, users on RHEL7 might consider upgrading to RHEL8, which supports the required OpenSSL version.

AttributeError: module 'lib' has no attribute 'OpenSSL_add_all_algorithms'

AttributeError: module 'lib' has no attribute 'OpenSSL_add_all_algorithms' when running ANTA

When running the anta commands after installation, some users might encounter the following error:

AttributeError: module 'lib' has no attribute 'OpenSSL_add_all_algorithms'

The error is a result of incompatibility between cryptography and pyopenssl when installing asyncssh which is a requirement of ANTA.

Solution

  1. Upgrade pyopenssl

    pip install -U pyopenssl>22.0

__NSCFConstantString initialize error on OSX

__NSCFConstantString initialize error on OSX

This error occurs because of added security to restrict multithreading in macOS High Sierra and later versions of macOS. https://www.wefearchange.org/2018/11/forkmacos.rst.html

Solution

  1. Set the following environment variable

    export OBJC_DISABLE_INITIALIZE_FORK_SAFETY=YES

Still facing issues?

If you’ve tried the above solutions and continue to experience problems, please follow the troubleshooting instructions and report the issue in our GitHub repository.