Most often, we come across the CloudHSM “Daemon socket connection error” when we try to connect to the key management utility (KMU) command-line tool or the AWS CloudHSM client

Here, at Bobcares, we assist our customers with several AWS queries as part of our AWS Support Services.

Today, let us see how we can resolve this error.

CloudHSM “Daemon socket connection error”

Generally, we come across this error if:

The client’s daemon is stopped.

-or-

The client configuration file doesn’t contain the IP address of an active and reachable HSM in the cluster.

• Troubleshooting lost connections to the cluster

We provide the IP address of the first HSM in the cluster when we configure the AWS CloudHSM client. The configuration file save it for the AWS CloudHSM client.

When the client starts, it tries to connect to this IP address. If it can’t, we might see errors like the following:

LIQUIDSECURITY: Daemon socket connection error
LIQUIDSECURITY: Invalid Operation

To resolve them, we need to update the configuration file with the IP address of an active, reachable HSM in the cluster.

To do so, our Support Techs recommend one of the following ways:

1. View the HSMs tab on the cluster details page in the AWS CloudHSM console
2. Use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to issue the describe-clusters command.

We need this IP address in a subsequent step.

Then we use the following command to stop the client:

Amazon Linux:

$ sudo stop cloudhsm-client

Amazon Linux 2, CentOS 7 & 8, RHEL 7 & 8, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS:

$ sudo service cloudhsm-client stop

After that, to update the client’s configuration file, we provide the IP address that we found above:

$ sudo /opt/cloudhsm/bin/configure -a <IP address>

Finally, to start the client, we run:

Amazon Linux:

$ sudo start cloudhsm-client

Amazon Linux 2, CentOS 7 & 8, RHEL 7 & 8, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS:

$ sudo service cloudhsm-client start

[Stuck in between? We are here for you]

Conclusion

In short, we saw how our Support Techs fix the AWS error for our customers.