Troubleshooting Abiquo Chef Integration

Troubleshoot Chef Configuration

Server URL

• Check your server URL. Remember that the API may be served from a different location to the Server Web GUI. 

Abiquo Server

• Check the time on your Abiquo Server.
• Check connectivity between the Abiquo Server and the Chef Server.

Chef Clients

• Check that the client names are exactly the same as the client names in the Chef Server.
• Check that the Chef admin client has admin permissions.

Default Validator Client Names and Keys

Diagnosing Common Chef Problems

Chef client does not work when booting virtual machine: "Synchronize the clock on your host"

Symptoms: The log /var/log/chef-client.log contains the error "synchronize the clock on your host"
Problem: The clock on the virtual machine is not syncronized.
Solution: Synchronize the clock with UTP on the virtual machine OR set the right date time in the hypervisor you are deploying with.

Troubleshooting Chef VM

Chef enabled VMs have two important software pieces installed:

1. Chef Client

2. Cloud-init version 0.7.9+

Cloud-init starts when the VM boots and is responsible for launching the Chef Client with the information from the Abiquo platform injected into the Configuration Drive.

Log files

There are two log files where info and error messages are reported by those two clients:

• Chef-client: /var/log/chef-client.log  includes any problem related to the Chef client run (when downloading or applying recipes).
• Cloud-init: /var/log/cloud-init-output.log contains both stdout and stderr from all cloud-init stages

The Abiquo support staff will request these log files when required.

Configuration Files

Chef client configuration

Everything required by the Chef client to run is stored in '/etc/chef'. If the directory is empty or does not exist, the problem is usually related to the Abiquo Chef agent.

Configuration drive

Abiquo creates a configuration drive ISO disk that contains Chef cloud-init data. See Automate first boot with Configuration drive and cloud-init

Network interface information

The VM must be able to reach the Chef server.

Abiquo Support staff will request the output of the following command (from within the VM) when required:

ifconfig -a

Sample ouput:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:13:93:C1:81:C8  
          inet addr:10.60.9.22  Bcast:10.60.9.22  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::216:d3ff:fec6:81d8/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:36291744 errors:0 dropped:501 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:24082889 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:46651233047 (43.4 GiB)  TX bytes:9767920879 (9.0 GiB)
          Interrupt:20 Memory:f8200000-f8220000 

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:77509 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:77509 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:10750209 (10.2 MiB)  TX bytes:10750209 (10.2 MiB)

Problems deploying VMs with Chef

First Run Fails

If a problem occurs when you first run the chef-client, the chef client will not be registered on the Chef Server. There will be a message like the following in the chef log file.

I, [2012-02-27T14:06:07.433431 #1104]  INFO -- : chef-client -N
ABQ-9fb4f9a5-3e3b-49cb-a590-c95c69b792be --once -j /etc/chef/first-boot.json
-L /var/log/chef-client.log
E, [2012-02-27T14:06:09.588769 #1104] ERROR -- : chef-client run failed