2011.3-0ubuntu4 introduced a change to the postinst to fixup permissions for upgrades to ensure that files in /var/lib/nova with group ownership of root or nogroup switched to nova
Unfortunately this does not take into account new installs - the permissions on /var/lib/nova remain as root:root so the nova-manage db sync command fails as the end of the postinst maintainer script.
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: nova-common 2011.3-0ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: User Name 3.0.0-11.18-virtual 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-11-virtual i686
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu1
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon Oct 3 09:27:50 2011
Ec2AMI: ami-5a6c5e2e
Ec2AMIManifest: (unknown)
Ec2AvailabilityZone: eu-west-1a
Ec2InstanceType: m1.small
Ec2Kernel: aki-64695810
Ec2Ramdisk: unavailable
NovaConf: Error: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/etc/nova/nova.conf'
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=en_GB.UTF-8
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.UTF-8
SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nova
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
Also caused nova-api to stop working generally as well.