On Wed, Jan 6, 2016, at 12:08 PM, Jonathan Lebon wrote:
One issue here is that cloud-init takes some time before realizing that it has no source. It tries to connect to the default metadata server address. It uses a 50s timeout it seems. We would probably have to reduce this to something more sensible (5s? 10s?).
Hm...that means we're a bit more reliant on metadata server availability.
Realistically, it *should* be very reliable for a cloud provider - it's just hosting a tiny amount of data. The cloud-init timeout here does seem extremely conservative.
But I'm hesitant to speak confidently about *all* cloud providers.
That said, the failure scenario here is just that we autogenerate a local root password only accessible on the physical console.
(In fact in this scenario, why generate a password at all? Just auto-login the first physical console, then the user can set a root password if they want)