VILLASnodeManager (actually the entire villas-controller) crashes as soon as the line
self._status = self.node.status
in VILLASnodeManager.__init__() is reached. This happens because self.node.status is trying to request the status from a running villas-node process. However if no villas-node process is running at this point this line crashes with urllib.error.URLError.
I can send my example configuration for villas-controller if necessary.