Allow console login is possible when cloud-init fails to run

[Christian Reis]

We are currently investigating how to improve our handling of failures during enlistment and commissioning. This bug discusses the situation where the boot process did correctly kick off, but cloud-init itself failed to correctly start; for instance, the network configuration may be incorrect or incomplete.

The first instinct when there is a failure is to log into the machine, but unfortunately that's not currently possible, because there are no credentials enabled on the machine. That makes debugging these failures particularly difficult.

Could we detect that cloud-init has failed to run and enable console login, perhaps analogously to what happens when Ubuntu fails to mount the root filesystem?

[Joshua Powers (powersj)]

Hi Kiko,

I am going to add the cloud-init task and let them comment on this.

Thanks!

[Dan Watkins (oddbloke)]

As this hasn't seen activity in ~4 years (and kiko is less concerned with MAAS these days), I'm going to mark it Incomplete. Please do move this back to New if this is still desired!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for cloud-init because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for cloud-images because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[James Falcon (falcojr)]

Tracked in Github Issues as https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/issues/2721