Troubleshooting

Files extracted from ZIP archives have lost their sticky bit (S_ISVTX)

chmod +t {name_of_file}

IBM z/OS C/C++ Failures

• When using pip to install packages, they might require a C/C++ compiler. See Using IBM C/C++ compilers with IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python for more information on setting up a C/C++ compiler.

  You can test your compiler by creating a new file with the following c program:

  
  #include <stdio.h>
  
  int main()
  {
      printf("Hello, world!\n");
      return 0;
  }

  and run <path_to_your_c_compiler> <filename.c> to compile the file, and use ./a.out to run it.

  If successful, the program will print out Hello, world! which means your compiler is ready to use with IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python.

• While using IBM XL C/C++ 2.4.1 for z/OS 2.5, you may encounter the following error:

   FSUM3224 xlclang++: Fatal error in /usr/lpp/cbclib/xlclang/exe/clcdrvr: signal 9 received

  This error occurs when the installation has not been completed. See Using IBM C/C++ compilers with IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python for download address for each C/C++ compiler.

• If your z/OS system is missing datasets which are created during the IBM z/OS XL C/C++ install process, you will encounter the following error:

  EDC5129I No such file or directory. (errno2=0x05940252) FSUM3221 xlc: Cannot spawn program /usr/lpp/cbclib/xlc/exe/ccndrvr - error: command '/bin/xlc' failed with exit code 255

  You should confirm if it has been installed successfully.
• If a package may have been tagged incorrectly while using IBM z/OS XL C/C++, while importing that package you will encounter an error similar to:

  Import Error: CEE3512S An HFS load of module <path to filename.so> failed. The system return code is 0000000130 and the reason code is 0BDF0C27.

  Verify if the shared library is untagged, by running:

  ls -alT <path to filename.so>

  If the file is tagged, with the following output message:

  t ISO8859-1 T=on

  you can remove the tag with the following command:

  chtag -r <filename.so>

Fatal Python Error: Failed to get random numbers

• Fatal Python error: _Py_HashRandomization_Init: failed to get random numbers to initialize Python

  This error shows up when you try to run Python without enabling Integrated Cryptographic Services Facility (ICSF). ICSF is typically responsible for supplying random data for /dev/urandom. You can run the following command to verify whether ICSF is enabled or not on your system.

  head -c10 /dev/urandom

• If ICSF is enabled, you will see random data and if it is not enabled on your system, you will encounter Internal Error. If you are on z13®, you must enable Integrated Cryptographic Services Facility (ICSF) on your systems where IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python runs.

For more information including installation guide, please refer to ICSF System Programmer's Guide and ICSF Administrator's Guide.

Python execution failure due to semaphore exhaustion

When semaphore exhaustion occurs on a machine, it can cause Python programs to fail in various ways. One common example will be an error message as follows:

_multiprocessing.SemLock(PermissionError: [Errno 139] EDC5139I Operation not permitted.

To diagnose whether semaphore exhaustion is an issue, you can run the following command to examine the number of semaphores that your user is currently using.

ipcs | grep <your ID>

If you run ipcs -y, you can get the limits for semaphores or the shared memory. If the number reported is close to that number, then it's likely that you are hitting the limit when running Python.

The following example shows how to approach cleaning up semaphore usage under your user id:

ipcs | grep <your ID> | awk '{print $2}' > semaphores_example.txt
for i in $(cat semaphores_example.txt) ; do { ipcrm -s $i >> /dev/null 2>&1; }; done;
for i in $(cat semaphores_example.txt) ; do { ipcrm -m $i >> /dev/null 2>&1; }; done;
rm semaphores_example.txt

Not found error for encodings module

You might run a Python script and get encodings module not found errors. The presence of the PYTHONHOME environment variable can lead to the mixing of Python versions:

$ python3
Fatal Python error: initfsencoding: unable to load the file system codec
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'encodings'

Current thread 0x26b7980000000001 (most recent call first):
CEE5207E The signal SIGABRT was received.
ABORT instruction

$ unset PYTHONHOME
$ python3

Errors when using setuptools

Errors for incorrectly tagged files

• If you see an error as the following error message:

  SyntaxError: Non-UTF-8 code starting with '\x84' in file test.py on line 1, but no encoding declared; see http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/ for details

  ensure that the file is either encoded as ASCII or IBM-1047 and correctly tagged. The interpreter doesn't attempt to auto-detect the file encoding if the file is already tagged. If the file is correctly tagged and encoded, check the non-printable characters in the file.

Issues building and installing PyPI packages

Not all packages can be built by using the default options provided in Python, and a given PyPI package may not contain compatible options for your C or C++ compiler definitions. You can often avoid compile failures, for example, changing C standard level, by using the environment variable CFLAGS.

For packages requiring C11 and later, see Using IBM C/C++ compilers with IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python for obtaining the recommended compiler.

Import Error: CEE3512S An HFS load of module <path to filename.so> failed. The system return code is 0000000130 and the reason code is 0BDF0C27.

ls -alT <path to filename.so>

t ISO8859-1 T=on

chtag -r <filename.so>

Packages unable to install cffi within a virtual environment

c/_cffi_backend.c:15:10: fatal error: 'ffi.h' file not found

<path to python3 install>/bin/python3 -m venv --system-site-packages venv

Redirecting to a file in a shell script results in garbled output

export _TAG_REDIR_ERR=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_IN=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_OUT=txt

UnicodeDecodeError error message

• UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xa3 in position 0: invalid start byte

  This error is returned when there is a conversion error. This error message usually refers to a file that is tagged incorrectly, or has a wrong encoding specified. To verify whether the encodings are correct, see Codesets and translation for more details.

Failure to launch the new IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python 3.14 REPL

Python 3.14.0 (heads/pyz_dev-3.14:bd1cf5a763, Oct 31 2024, 14:42:31) [Clang 18.1.0 (build 221a599)] on zos
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
warning: can't use pyrepl: 
>>>

export TERMINFO=<path_to_python_install>/usr/lpp/IBM/python/v3r14/pyz/share/terminfo

Running pip without AUTOCVT results in corrupted file generation

Running pip without AUTOCVT causes extra files to be created. These file names use conflicting encodings that results difficulty in deleting the files.

To resolve corrupt file generation, you need to set up the correct environment variables following the instructions in the IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Python documents. For more information on how to set up environment variables, refer to Set environment variables.

export_BPXK_AUTOCVT=ON
export_CEE_RUNOPTS= “FILETAG(AUTOCVT,AUTOTAG) POSIX(ON))”

Error installing PyPI package using requirements.txt file encoded in EBCDIC

UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xa4 in position 0: invalid start byte

iconv -T -f IBM-1047 -t ISO8859-1 requirements.txt > requirements_ascii.txt

pip freeze > requirements.txt

ssl.SSLError: [X509: NO_CERTIFICATE_OR_CRL_FOUND] no certificate or crl found

ssl.SSLError: [X509: NO_CERTIFICATE_OR_CRL_FOUND] no certificate or crl found

ls -alT <path to the certificate>

- untagged T=off

chtag -tc <encoding> <path to the certificate>