Cannot add an existing Cassandra cluster to OpsCenter ('ascii' codec can't encode character)

Question

While trying to add an existing Cassandra cluster to OpsCenter I encountered the following error:

Error creating cluster: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u03a7' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

This was in the OpsCenter logs:

2015-06-25 11:30:51-0700 [] ERROR: Problem while calling CreateClusterConfController (UnicodeEncodeError): 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u03a7' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128) File "/usr/share/opscenter/lib/py-redhat/2.6/shared/amd64/twisted/internet/defer.py", line 1020, in _inlineCallbacks result = g.send(result) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/opscenterd/ClusterServices.py", line 324, in _makeAndStartServices File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/opscenterd/ConfigFileManager.py", line 154, in loadFromDict File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/opscenterd/Config.py", line 673, in fromDict

This error was encountered with Datastax Enterprise (DSE) 4.7.0 and OpsCenter 5.1.3.

Answer 1

The problem is OpsCenter was trying to connect to the JMX on the new cluster with invalid credentials. I found this in the opscenterd.log file:

2015-06-25 11:30:51-0700 [] INFO: Adding new cluster 'clusterxyz': {u'jmx': {u'username': u'\u03a7 ', u'password': '*****', u'port': u'7199'}, 'kerberos_client_principals': None, 'kerberos': None, u'agents': None, 'kerberos_hostnames': None, 'kerberos_services': None, u'cassandra': {u'username': u'', u'seed_hosts': u'172.16.0.200', u'api_port': u'9160', u'password': '*****'}}

Looking back at the OpsCenter interface I noticed an "Add credentials" link on the 'Add cluster' dialog. I clicked that and saw that Firefox had autopopulated the 'JMX Username' and 'JMX Password' fields with invalid information. I cleared that out and was able to add the cluster.