cloud-init output not redirected to a file

[Scott Moser]

When debugging an enlistment, commissionig or curtin install, output of programs run by cloud-init is important.
By default in ubuntu images < 14.04, output of commands cloud-init runs go only to /dev/console.

since it seems quite common that we do not log a nodes /dev/console, the next best option is getting /var/log/cloud-init-output.log in the image.

Right now it seems we're only doing that for enlistment.

We need to make sure that the following cloud-config is passed into cloud-init in commissioning and curtin stages:
 output: {all: '| tee -a /var/log/cloud-init-output.log'}

This is less ideal than collecting consoles as /var/log/ will be on the tmpfs and thus writes will consume real memory.

This is the shorter path to somethign sane than getting cloud-init output going to rsyslog and back to maas.

[Julian Edwards (julian-edwards)]

> By default in ubuntu images < 14.04, output of commands cloud-init runs go only to /dev/console

Is this another way of saying that this doesn't/won't happen in 14.04 when released?

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

< 14.04: default is to stdout
14.04: default is "| tee -a /var/log/cloud-init-output.log"

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

so for my own reference later, to do this to an image easily, you can do:

img="/var/lib/maas/ephemeral/precise/ephemeral/amd64/20131010/disk.img"
echo "output: {all: '| tee -a /var/log/cloud-init-output.log'}" |
  sudo mount-image-callback $img -- sh -c 'tee $MOUNTPOINT/etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/99-output.cfg'