The extension fails with not obvious error: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 3229: ordinal not in range(128)

[sergey-koryshev]

Hi,

customer reported here microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent#4204 that the extension fails with following error:

VM has reported a failure when processing extension 'Microsoft.Azure.DevOps.Pipelines.Agent'. Error message: "The Extension failed to execute: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 3229: ordinal not in range(128)" More information on troubleshooting is available at https://aka.ms/vmextensionlinuxtroubleshoot

The root cause of this customer issue is that he tried to use agent 2.x on Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS which is not supported by this major version of agent, but error doesn't give a clue what is going on there. It looks like internal python-script error.

[o-l-a-v]

As written in the referenced GitHub issue, I got the same error with Ubuntu 22.04 and ADO agent 3.x. But I used Ubuntu 22.04 Minimal. So might be something missing on the VM for my part.

[pascalberger]

Same here with Ubuntu 22.04 and agent 3.220.0