Cinder leverages Keystone to provide authentication and authorization services. If the Keystone service is not running, it shouldn't take long for you to see the result. If you run a cinder command, such as cinder list or cinder create without running Keystone, you will see an error like the one shown here:

In this case, you want to check and make sure that the Keystone service is up and running. Refer to Chapter 2, Troubleshooting OpenStack Identity, for details on how to make sure that Keystone is running successfully. Imagine a scenario where you have confirmed that Keystone is up and running and yet when you run a cinder command you receive an error similar to the following:

In this case, you want to check the Cinder API log at /var/log/cinder/api.log. You are looking for a CRITICAL line or INFO line like the ones shown here:

The preceding error provides a clue that there is a problem with the authorization credentials that are used to fetch the auth token. In this case, you want to double-check the password of the cinder user as indicated in /etc/cinder/cinder.conf. Make sure that the credentials match the values loaded in Keystone for that user.

Cinder makes use of an AMQP server, which is typically provided by RabbitMQ in OpenStack installations. You want to confirm that RabbitMQ is up and running correctly. Suppose that you attempt to run a cinder create command such as this:

cinder create --name MyVol 1

If the preceding command hangs with no output, then check your Cinder api log at /var/log/cinder/api.log:

The preceding error is an example of what you will see when Cinder is unable to connect to your message broker. Cinder will keep trying to reconnect, and you will likely see a series of similar log lines in api.log. In this case, confirm that your AMQP server is up and running at the location indicated at /etc/cinder/cinder.conf.