mgr-sync refresh fails: 500 internal server error

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Environment

SUSE Manager 4.0
SUSE Manager 3.2

Situation

While running mgr-sync refresh on SUMA server, it fails with below error message:

Refreshing Channel families [DONE]

Refreshing SUSE products [DONE]

Refreshing SUSE repositories [FAIL]

Error: <ProtocolError for server.suse.com/rpc/api: 500 Internal Server Error>

Resolution

There are two options on how to resolve this problem:

1. Remove unnecessary organization credentials in webUI Admin -> Setup Wizard -> Organization Credentials
or
2. Increase timeout in apache2 configuration:

/etc/apache2/conf.d/zz-spacewalk-www.conf

ProxyTimeout 600

Cause

The error is caused by a timeout when fetching and inserting repository data. Timeout is by default set to 5 minutes. Usually timeout is reached when there are too many organization credentials added to SUSE Manager and these couldn't finish the refresh in 5 minutes. You can see the timeout expired in /var/log/apache2/error_log

[Tue Jul 23 11:51:12.911018 2019] [proxy_ajp:error] [pid 29471] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: AH01030: ajp_ilink_receive() can't receive header

[Tue Jul 23 11:51:12.911099 2019] [proxy_ajp:error] [pid 29471] [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:57764] AH00992: ajp_read_header: ajp_ilink_receive failed

[Tue Jul 23 11:51:12.911121 2019] [proxy_ajp:error] [pid 29471] (70007)The timeout specified has expired: [client xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:57764] AH00893: dialog to [::1]:8009 (localhost) failed

Disclaimer

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