Comment 2 for bug 871871

I can't replicate the "'NoneType' object has no attribute 'makefile'" message. Offhand that seems like a problem in your eventlet or paste modules. A clean install from devstack as of yesterday afternoon doesn't exhibit this behavior for me.

More broadly, the error handling here is dependent on the underlying libraries (openstackx and/or novaclient) returning usable error message, which in this case they basically don't. At best you see an "[Errno 111] ECONNREFUSED" message, or else you get an "n/a" (once auth gets switched to novaclient).

Longer-term we probably need to implement our own status code-based error handling. There's a larger issue of error messages (at login or in the dashboard when a service goes down, etc.) being vague and generally unusable. It then becomes a duplicate of #873125.