Physical devices dont show up in Xen’s Virt-Manager

Over the weekend I was working on setting up XenServer on Centos. Inside virt-manager while trying to add a new NIC card to the DomU there was a problem :(. I could select one of the virtual networks, but the dropdown box for bridged interfaces was empty. As I needed the VM to have a bridged connection this was a essential peice of the puzzle and something that I needed to fix.

After some quick googling I came across this bug on CentOS’s bugtracker. Same exact problem. The suggestion solution is running the connection.py.patch patch script which can be done by downloading it and running the following command provided by foxb.

cd /usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/
patch -p0 < connection.py.patch

I ran this, hoping for a fix but was left with the following error

patching file connection.py
Hunk 0000001 FAILED at 112.
Hunk 0000002 FAILED at 124.
2 out of 2 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file connection.py.rej


Lower down the posts there is a comment about how this doesnt work because the haldeamon is off, I tested to see if mines was on and instead it was not. Simply trying to start it results in a FAILED message, and no output into any system logs. After some more searching I found out that whats needed is to start messagebus first.

/etc/init.d/messagebus start
/etc/init.d/haldeamon start
/etc/init.d/xend restart


And boom! The devices are now in the virt-managers selection window!.