CA Performance Management (CAPM) Vertica adminTools fails to run with "Error: there was a problem opening the log file."

Products

• Network Observability
• CA Performance Management

Issue/Introduction

Cannot run adminTools on some nodes in a 3 node cluster with the following error generated:

[dradmin@DR_SERVER_01 /opt/vertica/bin]$ ./admintools -t list_allnodes
Error: there was a problem opening the log file.
Log file name: /opt/vertica/log/adminTools.log
Hint: this is often caused by a permissions error. Admintools should be run
as the database administrator, and the log files must
be writeable by the database administrator.

Environment

DX NetOps CAPM all currently supported releases

Cause

This is caused by an ownership or permissions issue affecting the directories under /opt/vertica. It can be caused when running the command:

/opt/vertica/sbin/update_vertica --remove-hosts <IP_ADDR_NODE-4>,<IP_ADDR_NODE-5>

When asked for the DB admin account, none was entered, which meant it used the default of dbadmin. This is incorrect, it should be dradmin (or whatever the DR admin user account is called). 

For example:

[dradmin@DR_SERVER_01 config]$ ll
total 64
-rw-r--r-- 1 dradmin verticadba 2143 Sep 19 07:36 admintools.conf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root    root       1625 Aug 25  2023 admintools.conf.bak.1692975593.236656
-rw------- 1 dradmin verticadba 2252 Sep 19 03:48 admintools.conf.bak.397442.675964
-rw------- 1 dradmin verticadba 2236 Sep 19 03:49 admintools.conf.bak.397493.139868
-rwxr-xr-x 1 dbadmin verticadba   25 Aug 25  2023 agent.conf
-rw------- 1 dbadmin verticadba  157 Sep 19 03:58 apikeys.dat
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dbadmin verticadba  234 Jul 25  2024 dbadmin.cron
drwxr-xr-x 2 dbadmin verticadba   95 Sep 19 03:58 https_certs
drwxrwxr-x 2 root    root         51 Feb 22  2025 licensing
drwxrwxr-x 2 dbadmin verticadba   70 Feb 22  2025 logrotate
-rw-rw-r-- 1 dbadmin verticadba  211 Jul 25  2024 logrotate_base.conf
drwxrwxr-x 2 dbadmin verticadba   77 Sep 19 03:58 share
-rw-r--r-- 1 root    root        562 Jul 25  2024 vsqlrc

Resolution

Change the ownership of all directories and files incorrectly owned by non-DR administrator account to the DR admin account ownership. This can be done on the command line the affected nodes by :

cd /opt/vertica 
find /opt/vertica -user dbadmin -exec chown dradmin {} \;

NOTE: change dradmin to whatever the actual DR admin user account is called on your system.

Once this is done, adminTools should be able to run on all nodes again.