clusterd silently fails to start if there's a syntax error in the source code

[Christian Reis]

While debugging an odd maas failure, I hand-hacked a library file and ended up botching it with a syntax error. Upon trying to start the clusterd process it appeared to have succeeded, nothing was logged but no twistd was left running.

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

(For all the detail, the actual file I hacked was /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/provisioningserver/import_images/download_resources.py and I put a maaslog.warn() statement missing quotes. But it shouldn't be hard to catch.)

My main concern is that we're actually not logging or telling the user about other more realistic failures in starting up the clusterd (such as no space on disk, etc).

[Raphaël Badin (rvb)]

The cluster is started by upstart and thus if something as dramatic as a syntax error happens, it will be logged in upstart's log: /var/log/upstart/maas-clusterd.log. I've recreated this and I got a message, as expected, in /var/log/upstart/maas-clusterd.log. Please re-open this bug if you didn't get a message in /var/log/upstart/maas-clusterd.log or if you disagree with my analysis.

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

Hmm, I don't think I like that logfile being used instead of something in /var/log/maas. Do our users know to look inside /var/log/upstart/?

[Raphaël Badin (rvb)]

> Hmm, I don't think I like that logfile being used instead of something in /var/log/maas. Do our users know to look inside
> /var/log/upstart/?

The doc probably should have a list of all the log files and what they mean. We could also alleviate the problem by creating a symlinks to the upstart log files in /var/log/maas (same as what we've done for apache's logs).

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

That sounds like a good approach.

[Andres Rodriguez (andreserl)]

** This is an automated message **

We believe this is no longer an issue on the latest MAAS releases. As such, we are marking this bug report as invalid. If you believe this is still an issue, please re-open the bug report and provide any relevant information.

Thanks.