When AutoPkg Meets a Munki Catalog Error

I auto run a list of 25 or so AutoPkg recipes twice a day and, if the run finds an update or throws any errors, I have the results emailed to me for review.

I recently updated to AutoPkg 1.0.0. The major feature of 1.0.0 is the Parent Trust Info which alerts you to changes made in a parent recipes. I set this up by running autopkg update-trust-info against all my recipe overrides. Then I checked all the recipe overrides with autopkg verify-trust-info which came back with OK for each override. I then ran my recipe list and I got this error for every recipe:

Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3840 "Encountered unexpected EOF" UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=Encountered unexpected EOF, kCFPropertyListOldStyleParsingError=Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3840 "Malformed data byte group at line 1; invalid hex" UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=Malformed data byte group at line 1; invalid hex}} Failed.

At first I thought I had an AutoPkg trust error because that is all that changed in AutoPkg. To rule out AutoPkg 1.0.0, I downgraded to AutoPkg 0.6.1 and ran my recipe list again. Same error.

I then tested a recipe I never used before: Zoom.munki. I made an override for it, like I do with all my recipes but sans the parent trust info, and ran it:

The following recipes failed: Zoom.munki Error in local.munki.Zoom: Processor: MunkiImporter: Error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3840 "Encountered unexpected EOF" UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=Encountered unexpected EOF, kCFPropertyListOldStyleParsingError=Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3840 "Malformed data byte group at line 1; invalid hex" UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=Malformed data byte group at line 1; invalid hex}}

Not exactly the same error as before. After closer inspection, it’s the MunkiImporter Processor that’s at fault. I haven’t made any recent changes that would cause MunkiImporter Processor to balk so what is going here? I wasn’t sure so I asked Greg who suspected that I have an invalid plist somewhere in my munki repo. He was right:

plutil -lint /Volumes/server/munki/catalogs/*

/Volumes/macupdates/munki/catalogs/all: Encountered unexpected EOF

That surprised me. Not sure how that happen but the fix is an easy one: Run makecatalogs which came back clean. I ran my recipe list again and everything was normal.

Curious, I checked for client errors in munkireport-php to see how many of my Macs where failing because of this catalog error. Zero. Why? Clients don’t use the all catalog as documented on the Munki wiki

Lesson learned.