SFTP Settings Deployment Fails in VCF Fleet Management with "command not found" Error

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)
• VCF Automation

Issue/Introduction

When configuring SFTP settings under Fleet Management > Lifecycle > Settings, the deployment to the Identity Broker (VIDB) and Automation (VCFA) clusters fails. This failure prevents critical operations, such as patching Identity Manager and Automation to newer versions (e.g., 9.0.1). Although initiating a "retry" for the deployment may appear to complete successfully, the status for the SFTP settings will persistently show as "failed."

Log entries, particularly during the execution of the SFTP secret creation script, will show errors similar to the following:

error: /data/vmsp/#######-####-####-####-############_sftp_create_secret.sh: YXYXYXYX 1: lUKilogeoPlast!c: command not found error: no objects passed

 

Environment

VCF Automation (VCF Automation) 9.x

VCF Operations (VCF Operations) 9.x

Cause

The underlying cause of this issue is that the SFTP password configured in Fleet Management contains certain special characters (such as !, #, %, &) that are not properly escaped or handled by the internal sftp_create_secret.sh script used for deployment. When the script attempts to process the password, these special characters cause the shell to misinterpret parts of the password as commands, leading to a "command not found" error and preventing the successful configuration of SFTP secrets.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, the SFTP password needs to be modified to avoid problematic special characters, and the SFTP settings must be re-deployed.

1. Access SFTP Settings:
   • Navigate to Fleet Management > Lifecycle > Settings > SFTP Settings within your VCF operations Fleet manager console.
2. Modify SFTP Password:
   • Change the SFTP password to one that primarily uses alphanumeric characters.
   • Avoid using common shell-interpretable special characters such as !, #, %, &, |, <, >, ;, ', ", etc. If special characters are required by your organization's policy, consult product documentation for a list of officially supported characters or test with a minimal set.
3. Save and Re-deploy Settings:
   • Save the updated SFTP settings. This action will trigger a new deployment attempt to the Identity Broker and Automation clusters.
4. Verify Deployment Status:
   • Monitor the status of the SFTP settings in Fleet Management to ensure they now show a successful deployment status.
5. Proceed with Operations:
   • Once the SFTP settings are successfully deployed and configured, you can proceed with configuring and performing backups, and then applying patches to both VIDB and Automation platforms as intended.