I have several virtual machines running on my Ubuntu 10.04 server. I normally look after them with virsh over ssh. However when I create new VM (as I'm trying to do now), I use virt-manager. This is so that I can work through the installation steps from my vm operating system iso image.

Up till now virt-manager has had no trouble connecting to the qemu host on my server. Suddenly virt-manager won't connect to my host. it asks for the root password of the server (3 times), then tells me:

Unable to open a connection to the libvirt management daemon.

Libvirt URI is: qemu+ssh://root@192.168.1.33/system

Verify that:
- The 'libvirt-bin' package is installed
- The 'libvirtd' daemon has been started
- That you have access to '/var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock'

Details:

Unable to open connection to hypervisor URI 'qemu+ssh://root@192.168.1.33/system':
cannot recv data: Connection reset by peer
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/connection.py", line 896, in _try_open
None], flags)
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/libvirt.py", line 111, in openAuth
if ret is None:raise libvirtError('virConnectOpenAuth() failed')
libvirtError: cannot recv data: Connection reset by peer

Maybe you need to install ssh-askpass in order to authenticate.

libvirt-bin is installed libvirtd seems to be running fine and I have access to /var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock.

I'm not sure what's changed (I suppose I've run apt-get upgrade on both the server the the machine running virt-manager).

I'm very new to all this so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.