critical libmamba Can't create 'ssl/cert.pem' During installation on Ubuntu

[JianminMedical]

Solution to issue cannot be found in the documentation.

• I checked the documentation.

Issue

When I trying to install miniforge3 on Ubuntu 24.04 with alternative installation location other than the default user home folder, a folder in another disk, it aborted with:
"critical libmamba Can't create 'ssl/cert.pem'"

The same with sudo previlige.

Installed packages

N/A

Environment info

N/A

[nodrogluap]

I'd like to second this bug. This appears to be a libmamba issue, so does it go somewhere else maybe?

The same behaviour occurs when using micromamba (which doesn't need the install script, so makes me think it's a more fundamental mamba library error).

More generally, the problem appears to be that almost any package install can give a similar error (e.g. Can't create 'lib/libgomp.so') if you set the MAMBA_ROOT_PREFIX variable to something other than the default. Using the same micromamba binary, have successfully installed packages when MAMBA_ROOT_PREFIX is on the local disk (e.g. /var/tmp). But the same install fails when MAMBA_ROOT_PREFIX is on an NFS-mounted filesystem, and an older OS (e.g. CentOS 7) is being used. Mamba package install using same NFS mount target on Oracle Linux 8 works fine.

[hmaarrfk]

can you check if this is resolved with our pre-releases:
https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/tag/24.5.0-0

[nodrogluap]

Hi,

It's still an issue, but I've narrowed it further. The issue is that depending on how the NFS mount is configured, you may not be able to create symbolic links (e.g. when the underlying target is a CIFS share). The Mamba library is trying to create symbolic links during install and fails, hence the "cannot create" error, which more aptly should be 'cannot symbolically link'.
Might be work a note in the install docs?

Cheers,

Paul

[hmaarrfk]

sure PRs welcome. yeah, NFS + linux is bad news in general...

[hmaarrfk]

wait, NFS, not SAMBA... strange...

[zachary-t]

Can confirm a seemingly identical error with SMB/CIFS shares on Ubuntu. A potential workaround is to add mfsymlinks to the cifs mount. Example below, running JupyterHub with users home directories stored on an SMB share.

/etc/fstab:

//smb.share/Jupyter/user /home/user cifs vers=3.0,mfsymlinks,credentials=/path/to/.smb.cred,forceuid,uid=user,forcegid,gid=user,dir_mode=0700,file_mode=0700 0 2

I have no clue what the ramifications of this are so buyer beware. At any rate, it does seem to fix the reported issue and install packages correctly (after a reboot and fresh environment), although I did get this ominous "error" while installing pip.

SafetyError: The package for ncurses located at /home/zachary/.conda/pkgs/ncurses-6.5-he02047a_1
appears to be corrupted. The path share/terminfo/E/Eterm
has an incorrect size.
  reported size: 2224 bytes
  actual size: 908 bytes

[zachary-t]

Update: I believe it's specifically an issue with installing .conda packages, as packages that are shipped as tarballs (e.g. _libgcc_mutex) seem to install just fine. Neither allow_softlinks: false nor always_copy: true (nor both) resolved the issue, which makes me question what exactly those configuration options are doing under the hood.

[blaylockbk]

Similar error:

critical libmamba Can't create 'pkgs/.constructor-build.info'

Same error when installing any of these
Miniforge3-24.5.0-0-Linux-x86_64.sh
Miniforge3-24.7.1-0-Linux-x86_64.sh
Miniforge3-24.7.1-2-Linux-x86_64.sh

[nodrogluap]

Ensuring the target filesystem can generate symlinks seems to be key. The mfsymlinks tip from zachary-t worked for me.