Why does pdf server fail with the message "ERROR pdfhandler:453 - Execution of Firefox for i386 failed"

[Alan_Bradley]

I'm seeing the following errors in my python.log after trying to install the pdf server:

2010-04-08 11:43:08,580 ERROR pdfhandler:453 - Execution of Firefox for i386 failed
2010-04-08 11:43:08,580 ERROR Execution of Firefox for i386 failed
2010-04-08 11:43:08,583 ERROR pdfhandler:584 - (500) Failed to generate a report using Firefox: Failed to start: Check that all Firefox dependencies are met 

I've tried to make sure all of the dependicies are met

> rpm -aq | egrep 'Xvfb|fire|xauth'
xorg-x11-xauth-1.0.1-2.1
xorg-x11-server-Xvfb-1.1.1-48.76.el5
firefox-3.0.19-1.el5_5

[sab231]

In Splunk 4.3.4 on Ubuntu server 11.4 you can fix the problem installing the libxcursor1 packet, it contains the libXcursor.so.1 library needed to execute the pdf generator.

[tpaulsen]

Same btw. is happening in Splunk 4.3.2

[tpaulsen]

We are running Splunk 4.1.2 on SLES10_64Bit and we get the same error message. When i use

DISPLAY=none $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps/pdfserver/bin/firefox-i386/firefox

it´s not working. But when i use the same command with the 64 Bit version:

DISPLAY=none $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps/pdfserver/bin/firefox-x86_64/firefox

Everthing seems fine. I guess the pdf-server apps doesn´t recognize that Splunk is on 64Bit and chooses the wrong firefox binary....

So what can we do about this?

[gareth]

That should be all you need - can you try running firefox directly and see if it reports a useful error?

Assuming $SPLUNK_HOME is set to the directory Splunk is installed in, please try running:

DISPLAY=none $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps/pdfserver/bin/firefox-i386/firefox

This should result in a message "Error: cannot open display: none" if all the dependencies are met, but will (hopefully) result in a more useful message in this instance.

[Michael_Wilde]

Update: In working with Gareth this past weekend. He asked me to try to install the "bitstream-vera-fonts" package.

yum install bitstream-vera-fonts

PDF Server now works properly!!!