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Hi, I've been trying to install Vertica Community Edition on a 3-node cluster in Amazon EC2. When I install on a single node, the install runs fine. But when I try to install on a 3-node cluster, or when I try to use the update_vertica script to expand the 1-node install to 3 nodes, I get the error below. Please help. Thanks!

Here is the command I run to try to install on a 3 node cluster in the beginning:
Here is the command I run after installing on 1 node, to try to expand to 3 nodes:
Here is the error I get when running either command:

Vertica Analytic Database 6.0.1-0 Installation Tool
Starting installation tasks...
Getting system information for cluster (this may take a while)....
Enter password for victor@10.0.0.60 (2 attempts left):
backing up admintools.conf on 10.0.0.50
NTP service not synchronized on the hosts: ['10.0.0.60', '10.0.0.70']
Check your NTP configuration for valid NTP servers.
Vertica recommends that you keep the system clock synchronized using
NTP or some other time synchronization mechanism to keep all hosts
synchronized. Time variances can cause (inconsistent) query results
when using Date/Time Functions. For instructions, see:
* http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_43_755.shtm
* http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_43_2790.shtm
Info: the package 'pstack' is useful during troubleshooting. Vertica recommends this package is installed.
Checking/fixing OS parameters.....

Error: No JSON object could be decoded
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/opt/vertica/bin/verticaInstall.py", line 1188, in <module>
if not SSH.check_min_free_kbytes(installerSSH, fix=True):
File "/opt/vertica/oss/python/lib/python2.7/site-packages/vertica/network/SSH.py", line 2425, in check_min_free_kbytes
data =json.loads( ''.join(res[host][1]))
File "/opt/vertica/oss/python/lib/python2.7/json/__init__.py", line 310, in loads
return _default_decoder.decode(s)
File "/opt/vertica/oss/python/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 346, in decode
obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
File "/opt/vertica/oss/python/lib/python2.7/json/decoder.py", line 364, in raw_decode
raise ValueError("No JSON object could be decoded")
ValueError: No JSON object could be decoded
Installation failed.

Hi,

Can you post the lines of output from your install runs that occur just prior to these lines?

Error: No JSON object could be decoded
Traceback (most recent call last):

Just to let you know, I had the same error on Debian. The cause was the script /opt/vertica/bin/validators.sh not retrieving a correct value. This Shell script is expected to return a json-formatted list of parameters.

In my case, the solution was to fix the script to work with the Debian package name vertica-ce (using $PACKAGE_NAME instead of the literal 'vertica'). In your case, it might have a different underlying cause in validators.sh, but the result is the same: that shell script will not return correct json code, which causes the error you're seeing. JSON object could not be decoded.

Try to debug the validators script by running it, see what results that gives.

The same error occured with me and i corrected at the same way as EagleEye. I changed the dpkg commands replacing vertica by $PACKAGE_NAME in the lines 196 and 205 of the /opt/vertica/bin/validators.sh script.