MAAS fails to release machine and provides no means to force release

[Jeff Lane ]

I recommissioned a machine and that broke because of issues around managing cipher suites.

But that left my machine in a failed state with a Power Error.

Alexsander suggested a commissioning script to re-enable the missing cipher suite to see if that fixes the underlying issue, however, to do that I need to trigger a commissioning again, and manually power the machine on.

BUT, maas refuses to release the machine (see screen shot) because of the power error.

The only real option from the Action menu is "Release" and that fails and there's no way to overrride or force the release that I can tell.

I could delete the machine, but that would then break our automation since deleting and recreating will mean the MAAS ID changes. I can't imagine this sort of scenario is unique.

So it would be nice if MAAS could override the power error complaints, and let me trigger a recommission and then manually power the machine on to run all the commissioning scripts (including the one that should restore disabled cipher suites).

[Anton Troyanov (troyanov)]

Hi Jeff,

Since MAAS is failing to configure BMC it won't be able to control machine power configuration.

In that case can you please try to change machine power configuration to manual?
That's under machine Configuration tab: Power configuration -> Power type -> Manual

Once it is set to manual MAAS should be able to release the machine and during recommissioning, it should set the power back to IPMI.

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

Yes, one of my team had hit upon that a while back and told me about that as a workaround.

It did let me release and recommission without deleting and re-enlisting the machine.

[Jerzy Husakowski (jhusakowski)]

When communication with BMC fails, MAAS currently does not offer sufficient guidance on how to recover from such a situation. MAAS could inform the user to switch to power configuration to manual and retry releasing the machine.