Odd locale error that has disappeared on reboot.

[Chris Green]

Julio Di Egidio <julio at diegidio.name> wrote:
> On 07/12/2021 16:28, Chris Green wrote:
> > I have a very short Python program that runs on one of my Raspberry
> > Pis to collect temperatures from a 1-wire sensor and write them to a
> > database:-
> > 
> >      #!/usr/bin/python3
> >      #
> >      #
> >      # read temperature from 1-wire sensor and store in database with date and time
> >      #
> >      import sqlite3
> >      import time
> > 
> >      ftxt = str(open("/sys/bus/w1/devices/28-01204e1e64c3/w1_slave").read(100))
> >      temp = (float(ftxt[ftxt.find("t=") +2:]))/1000
> >      #
> >      #
> >      # insert date, time and temperature into the database
> >      #
> >      tdb = sqlite3.connect("/home/chris/.cfg/share/temperature/temperature.db")
> >      cr = tdb.cursor()
> >      dt = time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M")
> > cr.execute("Insert INTO temperatures (DateTime, Temperature) VALUES(?, 
> round(?, 2))", (dt, temp) 
> >      )
> >      tdb.commit()
> >      tdb.close()
> > 
> > It's run by cron every 10 minutes.
> > 
> > 
> > At 03:40 last night it suddenly started throwing the following error every
> > time it ran:-
> > 
> >      Fatal Python error: initfsencoding: Unable to get the locale encoding
> >      LookupError: unknown encoding: UTF-8
> > 
> >      Current thread 0xb6f8db40 (most recent call first):
> >      Aborted
> > 
> > Running the program from the command line produced the same error.
> > Restarting the Pi system has fixed the problem.
> > 
> > 
> > What could have caused this?  I certainly wasn't around at 03:40! :-)
> > There aren't any automatic updates enabled on the system, the only
> > thing that might have been going on was a backup as that Pi is also
> > my 'NAS' with a big USB drive connected to it.  The backups have been
> > running without problems for more than a year.  Looking at the system
> > logs shows that a backup was started at 03:35 so I suppose that *could*
> > have provoked something but I fail to understand how.
> 
> Since it's a one-off, doesn't sound like a system problem.  The easiest 
> might be that you try-catch that call and retry when needed, and I'd 
> also check that 'ftxt' is what it should be: "external devices" may 
> fail, including when they do produce output...
> 
Well it repeated every ten minutes through the night until I rebooted
the system, so it wasn't really a "one off".  I hasn't repeated since
though.

-- 
Chris Green
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