nocloud-net datasource attempts to read seed url before network is set up

[Oliver Gerlich]

I'm using the nocloud-net data source with Ubuntu 22.04 server (ubuntu-22.04.1-live-server-amd64.iso). Apparently the data source attempts to download the meta-data file from the supplied "seedfrom" URL regardless of whether the network configuration has actually finished.

In my particular use case it takes about ten seconds until the network interface is configured (maybe the DHCP server is a bit slow). Meanwhile, the nocloud-net data source will do ten retries to download the meta-data URL (with 1 second delay between retries). So there is a race; and as result the auto-installation will only work in a few cases.

I'm booting the auto-install system with a kernel command line ending like "ds=nocloud-net\;s=http://192.168.1.2:8095/\;local-hostname=somehost".
I'll try to save and transfer the cloud-init.log file next time this happens.

[Chad Smith (chad.smith)]

it would be nice to somehow support datasource config options in NoCloud for:
max_wait, retries and timeout like other datasources ec2/gce/openstack/cloudstack do

[James Falcon (falcojr)]

Tracked in Github Issues as https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/issues/4021