Sitting in my hotel room today, I kept running into this error while trying to install OpenStack on a RHEL 7.1 VM running on my laptop. Digging through logs was not helping me one bit, and neither was trying to run “puppet apply” on the failing puppet manifests to see if I could get more info with which to troubleshoot.

Below is the specific error that I was running into. Note that my RHEL VM’s IP address is 192.168.122.75. This IP address is pre-pended to the puppet module names. Your output, will obviously, vary. Note that this output is truncated.

Applying 192.168.122.75_amqp.pp
Applying 192.168.122.75_mariadb.pp
192.168.122.75_amqp.pp: [ ERROR ]
Applying Puppet manifests [ ERROR ]

ERROR : Error appeared during Puppet run: 192.168.122.75_amqp.pp
Error: Could not start Service[rabbitmq-server]: Execution of ‘/usr/bin/systemctl start rabbitmq-server’ returned 1: Job for rabbitmq-server.service failed. See ‘systemctl status rabbitmq-server.service’ and ‘journalctl -xn’ for details.
You will find full trace in log /var/tmp/packstack/20150415-183003-mn6Kfx/manifests/192.168.122.75_amqp.pp.log
Please check log file /var/tmp/packstack/20150415-183003-mn6Kfx/openstack-setup.log for more information
Additional information:

Each and every time, the failure occurred when the installer was trying to install/start and rabbitmq-server via the puppet module amqp.pp. Attempting to start rabbitmq manually yielded the same result.

In this instance, I was trying to be fancy and I had given my VM the hostname packstack01.local (instead of sticking with localhost).

[root@packstack01 20150415-183254-Kv8u6k]# hostnamectl
Static hostname: packstack01.local
Icon name: computer
Chassis: n/a
Machine ID: ca64b7fb0c9d4459a4d313dd17b19d76
Boot ID: fc3397657ed040fca72f3d229d014b74
Virtualization: kvm
Kernel: Linux 3.10.0-229.1.2.el7.x86_64
Architecture: x86_64

Fresh out of any good ideas, I noticed that a simple nslookup on my made up hostname actually returned results. Results that I would not have expected to be valid.

[root@packstack01 20150415-183254-Kv8u6k]# nslookup packstack01.local
Server: 192.168.1.1
Address: 192.168.1.1#53

Name: packstack01.local.local
Address: 198.105.244.104
Name: packstack01.local.local
Address: 198.105.254.104

Despite never referencing my made up hostname in my answer file (by default, the answer file is generated with IP addresses only)  the Rabbitmq service was attempting to connect to itself via hostname, which obviously failed as this is a valid ip and since I was working in a hotel room without proper dns, my server was trying to connect to a machine on the opposite side of the country.

A quick bit of tinkering in the /etc/hosts file resolved this issue, and I was able to complete my install.

Note that there are probably many other reasons why one might run into this error during an OpenStack install via Packstack, however this is the one that I ran into, and thankfully it was easy to fix.

Note to self – always use localhost when working without a valid DNS entry.