The helpful suggestions in do-release-upgrade give no love to OpenStack

[rick jones]

When running "do-release-upgrade -d" it helpfully launches a backup sshd on port 1022 and even more helfully explains how to open-up an iptables rule to allow access to it. However, this may be insufficient if the do-release-upgrade command is being executed in an OpenStack compute instance because the security group rules for the instance/port may have to be updated as well. While it is likely the case that 99 times out of 10 the do-release-upgrade command is being executed in bare-iron, that 100th time out of 10 when it is being run in an OpenStack compute instance could benefit from some sort of "you may need to update security group rules" hint.

[Ben Howard (darkmuggle-deactivatedaccount)]

The problem that I see here is that OpenStack is only part of the cloud story -- there are others including EC2, Windows Azure, and even instances on other clouds where SSH is the standard mechanism to access the host. In order for this to work, the tool would need to either have a generic message about security rules or even detect the cloud. The problem with detecting the cloud, is generally you can only tell which hypervisor you're on, and even if you figure out that you're in OpenStack, the instructions might not be applicable for that OpenStack instance. I think that including helpful instructions is actually a sustaintial amount of work.

So while, in prinicple, I agree that this is good idea, I'm just not sure how to provide information that is accurate; in my opinion bad information is worse than no infomation. I think that this probably more of a Cloud papercut than a tool paper cut.

The answer, I think, is that we should include generic instructions on the Wiki under the Cloud section that generally detail this information.