Lethe's Tuxforge

 In my work and in my studies I’m more often than not using virtualization to get the job done, most of them time I’m using VMware or KVM together with virtmanager, the latter specifically for preparing to update my RHCE, but my new job requires me to spend a great deal of time dealing with Novell SuSe Enterprise Linux which includes and uses the Xen hypervisor with which I’m not that familiar as I’ve dealt both with Xen and Citrix Xen server in the past but always preferred other types of solutions.

Unable to open a connection to the libvirt management daemon virtmanager

Yesterday afternoon I was dealing with a test Xen installation that we are using in a lab for quick deployment of new Linux machines in the customer’s environment and after I installed Xen on the server I went to my laptop and fired up virtmanager  and tried to connect to the machine but all I could get back was the following error message :

 <em>Unable to open a connection to the libvirt management daemon.

Libvirt URI is: xen+ssh://root@foobar/

Verify that:
 - The 'libvirtd' daemon has been started

Unable to open connection to hypervisor URI 'xen+ssh://root@server/':
 server closed connection
None

Maybe you need to install ssh-askpass in order to authenticate. 

As it often happens it was not immediately obvious what the problem was specially if you think that I've used the same computer to connect to lot of KVM installations remotely without any problem, first thing I've checked were the firewall configuration, if the libvirtd was actually running and even restarted it but nothing nothing seemed to work.

I really started to feel frustrated and for the sake of being quick and get the job done I thought I would just give up the commodity of the GUI and would just revert to the command line, being the purist I am I even prefer this solution, and launched virsh and surprise surprise it has shown me what the real problem was with this easy to understand error message :

virsh # connect xen+ssh://root@server/
bash: nc: command not found

The nc command of the above error is part of the netcat package which can be installed under Red Hat and its clones with :

 yum install nc 

And in the case you are using SuSe, like I am at the moment, you can install the required package with :

 zypper install netcat-openbsd 

Once you have installed the required package on the SERVER virtmanager will connect to your Xen without any problem.

Hope you did find the article useful, if so please take the time to leave a comment or to retweet it, I will appreciate it and if you have any question and/or problems
just let me know.

Cheers Lethe.

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