Warning: remote connection disconnect, connection to 169.254.169.254 timed out

Question

I have a Ubuntu 14.04 Vagrant box. It seems to work fine most of the time, however every couple of days I'll get a problem. When Vagrant is trying to ssh into the machine, it gets a

Warning: Remote connection disconnect. Retrying...

This is printed every few seconds for a while until I'm given an error saying it timed out waiting for the machine to boot. I found this question which suggested booting into the gui with:

config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb|
  vb.gui = true
end

to see what was holding the VM up. It looks like the VM is getting stuck calling url_helper.py:

url_helper.py[WARNING]: Calling 'http://169.254.168.254/2009-04-04/meta/instance-id'
failed [101/120s]:request error [(<urllib3.connectionpool.HTTPConnectionPool object 
at 0x7ff2d6691450>, 'Connection to 169.254.168.254 timed out. 
(connect timeout=50.0)')]
url_helper.py[WARNING]: Calling 'http://169.254.168.254/2009-04-04/meta/instance-id'
failed [119/120s]:request error [(<urllib3.connectionpool.HTTPConnectionPool object 
at 0x7ff2d6682f50>, 'Connection to 169.254.168.254 timed out. 
(connect timeout=50.0)')]
DataSourceEc2.py[CRITICAL]: Giving up on md from 
['http://169.254.168.254/2009-04-04/meta/instance-id'] after 120s

This continues getting printed out until Vagrant fails:

<machine name>: Warning: Remote connection disconnect. Retrying...
<machine name>: Warning: Remote connection disconnect. Retrying...
<machine name>: Warning: Remote connection disconnect. Retrying...
Timed out while waiting for the machine to boot. This means that Vagrant was 
unable to communicate with the guest machine within the configured 
("config.vm.boot_timeout" value) time period.

If you look above, you should be able to see the error(s) that Vagrant had 
when attempting to connect to the machine. These errors are usually good hints 
as to what may be wrong.

If you're using a custom box, make sure that networking is properly working and 
you're able to connect to the machine. It is a common problem that networking 
isn't setup properly in these boxes. Verify that authentication configurations 
are also setup properly, as well.

If the box appears to be booting properly, you may want to increase the timeout 
("config.vm.boot_timeout") value.

but then a little while later will continue onto the login screen. At this point I can log in or ssh in, except some things aren't right. ie. the shared folders aren't mounted. The only solution I can find to this is to destroy and re-up the machine:

vagrant destroy -f && vagrant up

Which can take a while depending on the provisioning of the machine.

Has anyone else come across this problem before? Any suggestions on how to fix this?

Here is my current Vagrantfile:

VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2"

Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "trusty64"
  config.vm.box_url = "/media/resources/Development/Vagrant/Boxes/trusty64.box"

  config.vm.define "name" do |name|
    name.vm.hostname = "name"
    name.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.45.12"
    name.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 7070,  host: 7070
    name.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 7443,  host: 7443

    name.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb|
      vb.name = "name"
      vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", "2048"]
    end
  end

  config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
      ansible.playbook = "provisioning/playbook.yml"
      ansible.sudo = true
      ansible.verbose = "v"
      ansible.extra_vars = "@provisioning/user_vars.yml"
  end
end

By the way, the other answer to the linked question above (sending the enter key to the virtual machine through vboxmanage didn't work since I have a different problem to the asker of that question.)

UPDATE: Following @ElfElix's advice I had a look in /etc/network/interfaces and saw this:

#VAGRANT-BEGIN
#The contents below are automatically generated by Vagrant. Do not modify
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
    address 192.168.45.11
    netmask 255.255.255.0
#VAGRANT-END

Although, in /etc/network/interfaces.d/eth0.cfg is:

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

I tried removing this file to disable DHCP, but that just made it worse. Not only did the vagrant up fail, because it couldn't connect, but I was unable to ssh in after waiting a while.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

UPDATE II: It appears that the VM will only start after the initial vagrant up which will create and provision the machine. After halting the machine, it will no longer come up correctly since it encounters the above error.

Answer 1

If the machines ip is set by DHCP try setting it to be Static and set it up manually. The reason it keeps doing this every few days is that the DHCP has to check the ip and assign it again.

A virtual machine, server, ftp server, etc. should always have a static IP for being remotely connected to. As xlembouras said "IPs of 169.254.x.x range are used in special occasions of network problems," so what I am gathering is the DHCP server has assigned it an invalid IP (or an old one). So you'll have to make it static and set up the IP, (subnet) mask, and gateway on the machine manually. This can be done by on an ubuntu server (or *buntu machine) by doing the following (from terminal): (NOTE: you can use sudo instead of su if you prefer. NOTE: you can use VIM if you prefer)

sudo su
cd /
cd etc/network
vi interfaces

by default DHCP should be setup (even if it isn't in the text). If you see a line that says

"iface eth0 inet dhcp"

replace the "dhcp" with static and proceed to setup below it the IP and other stuff.

Example (do not use this verbatim as it is an example) :

iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.2
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.254

Now restart the network config(s) via

/etc/init.d/networking restart

If you'd like a detailed guide I'll save you the trouble of googling it, Change DHCP IP to Static IP on Linux