What to do when you get "JAAS config entry not terminated by semi-colon" errors on Conduktor Desktop?

Your Kafka cluster is up, you're signed into Conduktor Desktop but you're getting an error when trying to connect to your Kafka cluster, why and what can you do?

The error

You will see an error from the Conduktor Desktop Application which reads something like:

Couldn't connect to yourkafkaclusterhere:9092. You can check the logs for more details.

Further into the stack trace you will see an error which states:

Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: JAAS config entry not terminated by semi-colon

Why does this happen?

This error  means the configuration you have used to connect to your Kafka cluster from Conduktor Desktop is incorrect.

When it says your JAAS config entry is not terminated by semi-colon  this can happen when you put a line break in your configuration to connect to your Kafka cluster, potentially from copy/pasting incorrectly. 

An example of a good JAAS config seen as sasl.jaas.config  would be:

sasl.jaas.config=org.apache.kafka.common.security.plain.PlainLoginModule required  username="alice" password="alice-secret";

Here we can see the username is "alice" and the password is "alice-secret".

What to do?

1. Check your configuration, that there isnt an error with spaces or a line break and try to connect again. 

2. If it looks ok, you can try connecting to Kafka using a different method from your machine. While it is likely to be an error with the entry of the configuration itself it can be helpful to check using a different method to see if you get a similar error from your configuration.

For example try using Telnet or netcat to check connectivity to the Kafka cluster is ok, if connection is ok you will see a "Connected to 32.141.106.124" . 

An example using telnet:

Telnet host port 

which could look like:

telnet 32.141.106.124 9092