The vdsmd startup failing problem is now resolved :) The root cause was that the /etc/sudoers file (that we maintain a customized version of which thru Ansible) was missing the "#includedir /etc/sudoers.d" stanza, which caused a sudo problem with the vdsmd startup, since the sudoers include file "50-vdsm" wasn't being parsed. In going back and reviewing the thread, this was the first post that pointed out the real problem... -----Original Message----- From: Fabian Deutsch [mailto:fdeutsch at redhat.com] Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2015 12:58 AM To: Will Dennis Cc: Simone Tiraboschi; users Subject: Re: [ovirt-users] Problem with hosted engine setup - vsdmd does not start On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 4:52 AM, Will Dennis <wdennis at nec-labs.com> wrote: > Any clues out of the strace of vdsm? read(9, "sudo: a password is required\n", 4096) = 29 Could it be that sudo is not configured to operate passwordless? The strat-up can then fail, because sudo requires a ty, but this isn't available during service start. - fabian > On Nov 25, 2015, at 11:29 AM, Simone Tiraboschi <stirabos at redhat.com> wrote: > >> On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 5:22 PM, Willard Dennis <wdennis at nec-labs.com> wrote: >> [root at ovirt-node-01 ~]# sudo -u vdsm /bin/bash >> bash-4.2$ /usr/share/vdsm/vdsm >> bash-4.2$ echo $? >> 1 > > Can you please use strace on it? -----Message End----- However, not knowing about the missing sudoers include file, we continued to chase a vdsm config problem (uninstall / reinstall vdsm RPM pkgs, & use "vdsm-tool configure --force") Shame on me, it looks like I didn't think to check /var/log/messages for "vdsm"-string entries until today, where we found the "vdsm user could not manage to run sudo operation: (stderr: ['sudo: sorry, you must have a tty to run sudo']). Verify sudoer rules configuration” message that ultimately led to the solution :( However, not sure if it's possible to do so, but could /usr/share/vdsm/vdsm be made to emit a error to STDERR if it cannot run correctly? That's the only thing I could think of that may have helped me to resolve this earlier with what I did do...

Thanks for everyone's kind assistance, this really is a great community! :)

Fair enough… I think the phrase goes “the problem with idiot-proofing is that they keep making bigger idiots…” :) Are you saying that vdsm isn’t a sub-project of oVirt?

Who created it then, and where else is it used?

On Dec 20, 2015, at 2:07 AM, Yedidyah Bar David <didi@redhat.com<mailto:didi@redhat.com>> wrote: Well, I can think of other things as well, such as doing such a test during rpm/yum install stage, etc., but the question is how far should we go - there are many other ways to break ovirt, and we can't possibly consider all of them. That said, I guess patches are welcome (but you'll need to discuss this with a vdsm maintainer, not me, probably on gerrit and not here).