Nutanix CE | Pulse Connectivity Failure

As you could read none of my earlier posts I reconfigured my Nutanix CE node in a different vLAN and everything worked like a charm.

Worked? After all the configuration was done I moved my node back in its place in the technical cabinet and started the node so I could fiddle with it again. Logging into Prism Central gave me no issues, but when I tried to connect to Prism Elements the following message popped up:

What’s this? As long as Pulse is not working I cannot connect to the GUI, so this is annoying. I connect to the CVM using SSH to start troubleshooting.

1. Check if DNS is working correct

nslookup insights.nutanix.com

2. Check if the required ports are not being blocked.

nc -vz ncs01.nutanix.net 80
nc -vz ncs01.nutanix.net 8443
nc -vz ncs02.nutanix.net 80
nc -vz ncs02.nutanix.net 8443
nc -vz insights.nutanix.com 443

3. Check if my CVM gets a response from insights.nutanix.com.

curl -k https://insights.nutanix.com:443

4. Run Nutanix Cluster Checks for pulse

ncc health_checks pulse_checks run_all

Last thing to check if the NTP configuration is still ok

ncli cluster get-ntp-servers
ntpq -p

hmm, all things look good, no issues.

Luckily I’m not the only one with this issue and I found the following on Reddit, stating this is an issue with AOS 6.8 including a workaround.

So in the CVM I make a backup of the cron_servicaebility.py first

sudo cp /home/nutanix/serviceability/bin/cron_serviceability.py /home/nutanix/serviceability/bin/cron_serviceability.bak

Now I can safely edit the file using vi.
vi /home/nutanix/serviceability/bin/cron_serviceability.py
Scroll down and search for the following text (line 607 for me):

‪if((svccfg.enable_default_nutanix_email()o‬r 
    svccfg.enable_default_email_alert_contact_list()) and                      mode in ["leader"] and (not utils.smtp_server())):

and replace this with the following text

if(mode in {“leader”] and (not utils.smtp_server())):

And save the file.

run the script to check for syntax errors

/home/nutanix/serviceability/bin/cron_serviceability.py

Wait for a couple of minutes and login back to Prism Element. Now I see all the green check-marks and can login back to the cluster again.

Thanks @Gurft / Kurt Telep forthe solution, it drove me nuts 🙂