Chapter 10. Troubleshooting Minishift

This section contains solutions to common problems that you might encounter while using Minishift.

Depending on your operating system and shell environment, certain special characters can trigger variable interpolation and therefore cause passwords to fail.

Workaround: When creating and entering passwords, wrap the string with single quotes in the following format: '<password>'

If you use virsh on KVM/libvirt to create snapshots in your development workflow, and then use minishift delete to delete the snapshots along with the VM, you might encounter the following error:

~]$ minishift delete
Deleting the Minishift VM...
Error deleting the VM:  [Code-55] [Domain-10] Requested operation is not valid: cannot delete inactive domain with 4 snapshots

Cause: The snapshots are stored in ~/.minishift/machines, but the definitions are stored in var/lib/libvirt/qemu/snapshot/minishift.

Workaround: To delete the snapshots you need to perform the following steps.

~]$ rm -rf ~/.minishift/machines

It is recommended to avoid using metadata when you create snapshots. To make sure of this, you can specify the --no-metadata flag. For example:

~]$ sudo virsh snapshot-create-as --domain vm1 overlay1 \
--diskspec vda,file=/export/overlay1.qcow2 \
--disk-only --atomic --no-metadata

The problem is likely that the libvirtd service is not running. You can check this with the following command:

~]$ systemctl status libvirtd

If libvirtd is not running, start it and enable it to start on boot:

~]$ systemctl start libvirtd
~]$ systemctl enable libvirtd

The problem is likely that the virtlogd service is not running. You can check this with the following command:

~]$ systemctl status virtlogd

If virtlogd is not running, start it and enable it to start on boot:

~]$ systemctl start virtlogd
~]$ systemctl enable virtlogd

If you try minishift start and hit the above error, ensure that you use minishift delete to delete the VMs created earlier by you. However if this fails and you wish to completely clean up Minishift and start fresh do the following:

In case all of this fails, you may want to uninstall Minishift and do a fresh install of Minishift.

The problem is likely that the xhyve driver is not able to clean up vmnet when a VM is removed. vmnet.framework determines the IP address based on the following files:

Reset the minishift IP database, make sure to remove the minishift entry section from the dhcpd_leases file, and reboot your system.

{
  ip_address=192.168.64.2
  hw_address=1,2:51:8:22:87:a6
  identifier=1,2:51:8:22:87:a6
  lease=0x585e6e70
  name=minishift
}

If you use Microsoft Windows, make sure that you set the --vm-driver virtualbox flag in the minishift start command. Alternatively, the problem might be an outdated version of VirtualBox.

To avoid this issue, it is recommended to use VirtualBox 5.1.12 or later.

If you run Minishift with Hyper-V on Microsoft Windows as a normal user or as a user with Administrator privileges, you will encounter the following error:

Error starting the VM: Error creating the VM. Error with pre-create check: "Hyper-V commands must be run as an Administrator".

Workaround: To overcome this error you can either add yourself to the Hyper-V Administrators group, which is recommended, or run the shell in an elevated mode.

If use PowerShell, you can add yourself to the Hyper-V Administrators group as follows:

You can also use the GUI to add yourself to the Hyper-V Administrators group as follows:

Now you can run the Hyper-V commands as a normal user.

For more options for Hyper-V see creating Hyper-V administrators local group.