Comment 4 for bug 918238

I don’t think we can fix this bug at the moment. The issue roots from RabbitMQ.

RabbitMQ (and therefore Kombu) is not returning the actual error code to the Nova api code at all. By design, RabbitMQ simply disconnects the client connection on authentication error ... As a result IOError is all we can report.

Here’s the traceback:
http://paste.openstack.org/show/56773/

Some resources that document this RabbitMQ behavior:
http://lists.rabbitmq.com/pipermail/rabbitmq-discuss/2010-May/007095.html
http://clojurerabbitmq.info/articles/error_handling.html (see the Authentication Failures section)

RabbitMQ 3.2 (released Oct 2013) introduces “Authentication Failure Notifications”, which allows authentication exceptions to be caught by the client.

http://www.rabbitmq.com/auth-notification.html

I’m not sure if Kombu is capable of processing the new RabbitMQ 3.2 “Authentication Failure Notifications” yet. Pending further investigation.