TIRA Submission Fails with HTTP 500 After Successful Smoketest + Image Upload

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1

Hi,

I am trying to submit to the PAN 2026 Multi-Author Writing Style Analysis task as team spcrc.

After a long debugging process, my container now:

  • builds successfully

  • passes the smoketest successfully

  • produces correct outputs

  • uploads Docker layers successfully

  • passes image compatibility checks

However, the final registration step consistently fails with an HTTP 500 error from the TIRA backend.

The important part is that the full smoketest completes successfully before the failure occurs.

Relevant logs:

Finished: 9 docs in 174.2s (0.1 doc/s)

######################################### Review the Outputs of your Software ##########################################
# Your software produced the following outputs in tira-output.
########################################################################################################################

 - hard: 4096 bytes
 - .tracking-results.yml: 24364 bytes
 - medium: 4096 bytes
 - easy: 4096 bytes

Are the outputs correct and should I push the software to TIRA? (y/N) y

Docker upload also appears to complete:

Push Docker image

Pushing (67e8c37b2942):: ...
Pushing (b731c310c6c2):: ...
Pushing (a28d4ee5ea19):: ...
...
Upload TIRA_SOFTWARE ...

But after that, the backend returns:

Upload of software failed with error

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <title>Server Error (500)</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Server Error (500)</h1><p></p>
</body>
</html>

and response code 500.

Additional context:

  • I already rebuilt the image with:

    • DOCKER_BUILDKIT=0

    • --platform linux/amd64

  • The earlier “image incompatible with cluster” issue is resolved.

  • The image is hosted on DockerHub:

    • docker.io/shubhankark/pan26-style-change:latest

  • The container runs fully offline and passes the smoketest locally through tira-run.

Could someone please help check whether:

  1. the software was partially registered despite the 500 error, or

  2. there is currently a backend issue affecting submission registration?

Thanks a lot.

2

Solution: TIRA Docker Submission Fails Due to OCI/containerd Image Format Incompatibility

Hi all,

I finally managed to solve the repeated TIRA upload failures and wanted to document the actual root cause in case it helps others.

Symptoms

I repeatedly encountered issues such as:

  • connection reset by peer

  • HTTP 500 errors during software registration

  • The uploaded image is compatible with the cluster

  • Docker submissions failing despite successful smoketests

  • tira-cli code-submission failing even though the container itself worked correctly

The confusing part was that:

  • the software executed correctly locally,

  • smoketests passed,

  • Docker images uploaded successfully,

  • but TIRA would still reject the submission.

Actual Root Cause

The issue was NOT my software.

The real problem was that my Docker installation was producing OCI/containerd-style image manifests that are incompatible with the current TIRA registry/cluster setup.

My environment was:

docker version


Docker 29.x
containerd 2.x

and:

docker info | grep -i containerd

showed:

driver-type: io.containerd.snapshotter.v1

This was the key issue.

How I Fixed It

1. Disable the containerd snapshotter

I created:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/docker
sudo nano /etc/docker/daemon.json

with the following contents:

{
  "features": {
    "containerd-snapshotter": false
  }
}

Then restarted Docker:

sudo systemctl restart docker

After that:

docker info | grep -i containerd

NO LONGER showed:

driver-type: io.containerd.snapshotter.v1

2. Disable BuildKit

Before building/submitting:

export DOCKER_BUILDKIT=0
export COMPOSE_DOCKER_CLI_BUILD=0

3. Verify installation properly

This step is VERY important.

Do NOT only run:

tira-cli verify-installation

Instead run:

tira-cli verify-installation \
  --task YOUR-TASK-NAME \
  --team YOUR-TEAM-NAME

This performs the FULL image compatibility test.

Before the fix, it failed with:

âś– The uploaded image is compatible with the cluster.

After the fix:

âś“ The uploaded image is compatible with the cluster.
âś“ Your TIRA installation is valid.

Final Result

After disabling the containerd snapshotter and rebuilding the image, the submission finally succeeded normally through tira-run --push true.

Hopefully this helps others avoid spending hours debugging infrastructure issues that are unrelated to their actual software.

Thanks to the organizers and everyone who posted earlier hints about OCI/containerd incompatibility.

3

Dear @So-bonkers,

Thanks for this detailed report!

I link this report also in our corresponding post on how to ensure that the images are compatbile, as I think this might be really helpful for others.

Best regards,

Maik

4

Hi Maik,

There seems to be a problem with TIRA where I am unable to see the reviews. Can you kindly look into this. My current run is titled “blazing-window”. For the previous runs, I fumbled the directory structure expected for the input and the turnaround time between reviews and scheduling is too long

5

Hi,

I need to manually unblind the results so that you can see them, the software “blazing-window” had a problem, I unblided the results, but the subsequent submission “exact-solute” produced valid results :slight_smile:

Best regards,

Maik

6

Hi Maik,

Thank you very much for checking and manually unblinding the results — I really appreciate the help.

I’m glad to know that the submission “exact-solute” produced valid results. I just wanted to confirm whether the run is now fully accepted for the leaderboard, or if there is still any action required from my side (such as manually publishing the run once the evaluation finishes).

At the moment, I do not yet see the publish/download options in the interface, so I was unsure whether the evaluation is still being finalized or if I should wait for further review.

Thanks again for your assistance and for looking into this.

Best regards,
Shubhankar

7

Dear Shubhankar,

Yes, it is accepted for the leaderboard, everything is fine. The leaderboard and the scores will be visible after the deadline (we unblind them when all submissions are finalized).

Best regards,

Maik

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