+ in secret_key can cause problems

[tderouin]

Since it looks like knox is no longer maintained, I thought I'd write about this issue I ran into with keystone and S3 that may help other people out.

We were getting 403 errors when uploading to S3 through keystone, but with the same credentials we could upload using s3cmd. It wasn't a region issue, the bucket was in the US standard region, and I tried explicitly setting the region with no luck.

I noticed there was a plus sign in the AWS secret key, so on a whim, I created another separate user with the same credentials as the original account, and I was able to upload with the new account on both s3cmd and keystone/knox. The new secret key did not have a + sign in it.

It's probably an encoding issue.