Today I was helping a colleague to get an existing application containerized. To run the containerized workload we were using Podman Desktop. When we opened Podman Desktop, we got the question if we wanted to upgrade the podman version. Of course we said yes!
Unfortunately after the upgrade was completed, podman failed to start and always returned the following error message:
> podman build
Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM
Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: open C:\Users\<username>\.ssh\known_hosts: The system cannot find the path specified.
We were able to continue by applying a workaround. By manually creating the .ssh folder in the user directory podman was able to run successfully.
Problem solved!