This article covers common issues with Formant agent installations and their fixes.

Start by reviewing the Formant agent log:

journalctl -feu formant-agent

Formant agent failing to authenticate

During agent re-provisioning, you may see an error in the agent logs that mention:

no agent configuration file found  
2023-10-23T13:51:34.416Z        INFO     no agent configuration file found

2023-10-23T13:51:34.416Z        INFO     missing configuration,  
syncing with cloud ...

2023-10-23T13:51:34.872Z        WARN     Agent authentication failed,  
please contact an administrator to continue.

To resolve this, remove the credentials.toml file in /var/lib/formant directory and attempt the re-provision again.

The Formant agent ROS bridge is not running

Many components of the Formant agent ROS bridge are python3 processes. Try running import rospy in a python3 shell. If this import errors, you may have to install python3-roskpg-modules:

apt install python3-rospkg-modules

Please make sure you have the following packages installed on Python 3 for ros_bridge:

rosgraph
roslib
rostopic
std_msgs
GTK
gi
sensor_msgs
genpy
actionlib_msgs
geometry_msgs
sensor_msgs

The following packages need to be installed on Python 2 for tf2_bridge:

rosgraph
rospy
tf2_ros
genpy

ImportError: cannot import name Gst, introspection typelib not found

Some systems will not have a video streaming dependency installed. To fix, you can install the following:

apt install gir1.2-gst-rtsp-server-1.0

/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d returned 101, not running 'enable formant-agent.service'

The system's policy-rd.d may be set up to disallow enabling services.

Edit /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d to exit 0 instead of 101.

ROS data is not showing up in Formant

If the installation was successful, but the ROS based data is not displaying in the Formant UI, it is likely that the agent did not detect that it was ROS based device. Check the values for your Environment variables for the agent and make sure they all look correct.

Make sure that ROS node information is showing up on the default stream $.ros.node_online. If no data is coming in on this default stream, the Formant agent has not connected to ROS.

You can also check to make sure that the Formant agent has proper permissions to ingest data:

Check ownership of the Formant agent's .bashrc file:

sudo ls -lah /var/lib/formant/.bashrc

You should see formant-formant.

You can also check the proper permissions for Formant's .bashrc file:

sudo chmod 777 /var/lib/formant/.bashrc

See also

• Install the Formant agent
• Install the Formant agent via Docker
• Environment variables for the agent

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