[bastil]

Hello all,

I have compiled OF 2.3.x successfully, everything went fine. Now I tried to run the motorbike tutorial. For this, every application (even blockMesh, surfaceFeatureExtract,...) fails:

--> FOAM FATAL IO ERROR:
Cannot open controlDict
file: /fem7a/BL/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-2.3.x/etc/controlDict at line 0.

However, this file is present:

ls -la /fem7a/BL/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-2.3.x/etc/controlDict 
-rw-rw-rw- 1 fem user 31268 13. Feb 10:19 /fem7a/BL/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-2.3.x/etc/controlDict

I have no idea what is wrong there?

[wyldckat]

Greetings Bastil,

My guess is that you're witnessing SELinux doing its job.
A few questions:

1. Are you able to open the file with a regular text editor?
2. Did you build OpenFOAM with user permissions or root permissions?
3. Try using the "-Z" option for ls:
   

   ls -laZ $WM_PROJECT_DIR/etc/controlDict

   it should tell you what permissions it has associated for the SELinux security system.

Best regards,
Bruno

[bastil]

Originally Posted by wyldckat

Are you able to open the file with a regular text editor?

1. Did you build OpenFOAM with user permissions or root permissions?
2. Try using the "-Z" option for ls:
   

   ls -laZ $WM_PROJECT_DIR/etc/controlDict

   it should tell you what permissions it has associated for the SELinux security system.

Thanks Bruno,

yes I can open the file with a text editor and everything in there looks fine.

1. I build with user permissions
2.

 ls -laZ $WM_PROJECT_DIR/etc/controlDict
-rw-r--r--  fem user                                  /fem7a/BL/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-2.3.x/etc/controlDict

Ideas?

[wyldckat]

Hi Bastil,

This error seems very familiar... I was almost certain this was an SELinux issue, but your system isn't even reporting anything about the SELinux context for the file.

OK, the two ideas that come to mind are as follows:

1. Try using the cat command, since it's an executable:
   

   cat $WM_PROJECT_DIR/etc/controlDict

   It should show the whole content of the file in question.
2. Create a simple executable in your home area, which reads and prints out this file. For example:
   1. compile a "test.cpp" file with something like this inside it:
      

      // reading a text file
      #include <iostream>
      #include <fstream>
      #include <string>
      using namespace std;
      
      int main () {
        string line;
        ifstream myfile ("/fem7a/BL/OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-2.3.x/etc/controlDict");
        if (myfile.is_open())
        {
          while ( getline (myfile,line) )
          {
            cout << line << '\n';
          }
          myfile.close();
        }
      
        else cout << "Unable to open file"; 
      
        return 0;
      }

      • Reference for the source code: http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/files/
   2. I think you can build it with:
      

      g++ test.cpp -o mytest

   3. Then you can run it simply by running:
      

      ./mytest

      It should do the same as cat did.

Beyond this... it feels like this could be an issue related to NFS? I say this because of the strange path "/fem7a/BL", which suggests a special file-system, which is either network based or has some security measures in place.

Best regards,
Bruno

[bastil]

Thanks. I needed to rebuild because of another problem which now fails (see my other post) so this is not so important at the moment.