Teleport does not return usable errors

[kontsevoy]

We need a better error story. Something quick, cheap and user-friendly. Currently our error messages are basically concatenated log entries.

Example

My teleport server already has a user named ekontsevoy. When I try to invite myself again:

> tctl users invite ekontsevoy

I get this back printed into console:

edsger ~/go/src/github.com/gravitational/teleport: out/tctl users invite ekontsevoy
ERROR: bad parameter 'errorcode', unrecognized http error: <nil> 500 {"path":"/home/ekontsevoy/go/src/github.com/gravitational/teleport/lib/auth/srv.go","func":"github.com/gravitational/teleport/lib/auth.(*APIServer).createSignupToken","line":644,"Message":""}

A number of issues here:

• No need to show source files and line numbers. End users do not care.
• Only high level error needs to be shown, not the "guts" of the problem.
• In this case something else entirely is going on though

Desired outcome

Clean error messages like:

• user foo already exists
• user foo not found

[kontsevoy]

Also, something has changed in trace implementation and unwrap() function no longer works in lib/utils/cli.go. (trace.Error.OrigError() points to itself (!) leading to endless loop potential) I am leaving this as-is since changing it should probably conform to whatever error reporting mechanism you decide to use.

My guess it's going to be something similar you're doing with Web UI

[kontsevoy]

One more example. I am logging in via tsh using a fresh database (no users) and I expect a typical nice "unrecognized username/password error" without any references to the source code.

Instead, on a server I see:

ERRO[0542] Password auth error: bucket web not found     file=auth/tun.go:350

On the client:

ERRO[0004] bad parameter 'errorcode', unrecognized http error: <nil> 500 {"path":"/home/ekontsevoy/go/src/github.com/gravitational/teleport/lib/web/web.go","func":"github.com/gravitational/teleport/lib/web.(*Handler).createSSHCert","line":373,"Message":""}  file=client/api.go:372

[kontsevoy]

Another example. I am connecting to a non-existing server. Expecting a nice message "cannot locate remote host XXX" (actually, why wouldn't proxy try to connect to it anyway? this is a subject of another ticket)

Instead I see this in the server logs:

INFO[1151] close session request: sess(127.0.0.1:48118->127.0.0.1:3023, user=ekontsevoy, id=6) failed to execute request, err: [srv/proxy.go:74]  server XXX:3022 not found  component=proxy fields=map[local:127.0.0.1:3023 remote:127.0.0.1:48118 user:ekontsevoy id:6] file=srv/srv.go:498

On the client:

ERROR: [client/api.go:157]  [client/client.go:227]  ssh: handshake failed: EOF