type assertion error could occur

[takuhiro]

Describe the bug

We hit the following error in our environment just once.

time="2023-02-01T02:04:48Z" level=fatal msg="could not perform assertion: hybridControllerFrontend.(controllerhelpers.ControllerHelper)"

As I can see the trident log, the process exited by the fatal error and then the trident container was restarted successfully.

hybridControllerFrontend could be nil if a temporary error(e.g. failure of creating k8s client) occurs here, which causes the type assertion error.
The err is checked here, but before that, the err is overwitten here. So if k8sctrlhelper.NewHelper failed but k8snodehelper.NewHelper succeeded, the error check would be passed and the type assertion of hybridControllerFrontend would be executed even though it is nil.

Environment
Provide accurate information about the environment to help us reproduce the issue.

• Trident version: v23.01.0
• Trident installation flags used: silenceAutosupport: true (Trident Operator)
• Container runtime: containerd 1.6.10
• Kubernetes version: v1.25.6
• Kubernetes orchestrator: none
• Kubernetes enabled feature gates: none
• OS: Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS
• NetApp backend types: ONTAP 9.9.1P9
• Other:

To Reproduce
It is difficult to reproduce this problem intentionally, but I think it would be reproduced if you changed the code to make k8sctrlhelper.NewHelper always return error here.

Expected behavior
handle the error correctly

Additional context
Add any other context about the problem here.

[gnarl]

Hi @takuhiro,

This issue is fixed with commit afb725a and will be included in the Trident v23.04 release.

[takuhiro]

Thank you @gnarl !