Troubleshooting

A session does not come up, a prefix is not announced, a command cannot reach ansage.

Where to look

ansage show summary              # one line per neighbor: state, since when, prefixes
ansage show peer 10.0.0.1        # last error, last down, negotiated capabilities, counters
journalctl -u ansage -f          # the log

More detail in the log: RUST_LOG=ansage=debug in the unit's environment (systemctl edit ansage, then [Service] Environment=RUST_LOG=ansage=debug). --log-format json writes one JSON object per line for a log pipeline.

The session does not come up

ansage show peer shows why in Last error (our side) or Last down (a NOTIFICATION):

  State: Idle for 3.0s
  Last error: 3.0s ago, connect: Connection refused (os error 111)
  Reconnect: backoff 10.0s, next attempt in 816ms

Symptom	Likely cause
`connect: Connection refused`	the router does not listen, or does not know ansage's address as a neighbor
`connect: ... timed out`, state stays `Connect`/`Active`	firewall or routing between ansage and the router; TCP port 179
`notification received: cease (6/7)`	the router rejected the connection (Connection Rejected): it has no neighbor for ansage's address, or already a session
OPEN error, Bad Peer AS	`asn` on one side does not match `remote-as` / `neighbor ... as` on the other
works without TCP-MD5, fails with it	keys differ, or only one side has one; check `password` / `password_file`
works without `ttl_security`, fails with it	the router does not send TTL 255 or is more hops away than set

The reconnect delay doubles after every failure up to max_connect_retry (default 600 s). ansage peer 10.0.0.1 reset connects again at once and resets the delay, see Take one neighbor down.

The router does not have my prefix

ansage show summary: is the prefix under Announcing? A runtime ansage withdraw lasts until a restart.
Is ansage drained? ansage show summary says Drained for ...; routers prefer other paths then.
Is the SENT v4/v6 count 0 for one family? The session runs over the other family and ansage has no next hop for it: set next_hop_ipv6 (or next_hop_ipv4), see Next hops.
Did the router accept it? FRR with bgp ebgp-requires-policy (the default) drops routes without a route map; BIRD needs import in the matching channel.

A command cannot reach ansage

ansage: cannot connect to /run/ansage/ansage.sock: Permission denied (os error 13) (is ansage running, and is this its control_socket?)

Your user is not in group ansage. sudo usermod -aG ansage "$USER" (or the installer's --operator), then log in again.

ansage: cannot connect to /run/ansage/ansage.sock: No such file or directory (os error 2) (is ansage running, and is this its control_socket?)

ansage is not running, or uses another control_socket: pass -c /etc/ansage/ansage.toml (ansage reads the socket path from it) or -s SOCKET.

ansage does not start

ansage check -c /etc/ansage/ansage.toml

prints what is wrong with the config, e.g. prefix "10.0.0.1/8": host bits set, did you mean 10.0.0.0/8?. With [kernel], ansage also refuses to start without CAP_NET_ADMIN and says so; the installer enables it in the unit when the config has [kernel].

A reload is refused

asn, router_id, listen, control_socket and metrics_listen need a restart. A reload that changes them, or an invalid file, changes nothing: ansage runs on with the old config. See Reload.