Open Stack

Hi all!

Today while playing with my installation I noticed that we do try to run 
cleaning for nodes in maintenance mode. This leads to a somewhat 
confusing result, because we no-op heartbeats for such nodes. So 
cleaning gets stuck in "clean wait" forever [1].

However, it seems like some folks find it a convenient feature. This way 
they can ask Ironic to boot the ramdisk and make it wait for operator's 
commands. It's a fair use case, but I still find the current situation 
confusing.

We've ended up with these few options:

1. Ensure we don't run cleaning for nodes in maintenance mode. I've 
proposed a patch [2] banning most of provision verbs from working in 
maintenance. However, we still want to allow deleting an instance, which 
still results in cleaning.

2. On receiving a heartbeat in {CLEAN,DEPLOY}WAIT and maintenance on 
[3], move the node to {CLEAN,DEPLOY}FAIL (optionally without powering it 
off, so that IPA stays running).

3. Document this as a desired feature and don't change anything.

What do you think?

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ironic/+bug/1621006
[2] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/366793/
[3] 
https://github.com/openstack/ironic/blob/master/ironic/drivers/modules/agent_base_vendor.py#L474-L478.