Munin and “Can’t use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference”
I recently came across a rather obscure and vague error in Munin:
Can't use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference at /usr/share/perl5/Munin/Master/HTMLOld.pm
It seems there are quite a few error reports on this, with very different suggestions on how to solve the problem – and for some, the problem was never solved.
In this case, we found that the FastCGI process that contructs the HTML structure (munin-cgi-html) was not able to read the file /var/lib/munin/htmlconf.storable due to a strict system umask (027, instead of the more normal 022). The htmlconf.storable file is written with system umask and ownership munin:munin, so the FastCGI process running as the user www-data will not be allowed to read this file.
File permissions with umask 022:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 munin munin [...] /var/lib/munin/htmlconf.storable
File permissions with umask 027:
-rw-rw---- 1 munin munin [...] /var/lib/munin/htmlconf.storable
There’s a recent ticket for making the process responsible for writing this file (and some others) set its own umask instead of relying on the system umask. That would have fixed this issue. In the meantime, the issue can be circumvented by changing directory ownership on /var/lib/munin, specifying umask for the Munin user, or running the FastCGI process as the Munin user.