cloud-init fails strangely on oVirt and Fedora 30 with error "IsADirectoryError: [Errno 21] Is a directory: '/var/lib/cloud/instance'"

tshikose · 09-30-2019, 01:57 PM

Hi,

I am using oVirt 4.2.
And I have problems working with cloud-init (cloud-init-17.1-9.fc30.noarch) with Fedora 30 based template.

The steps I used are as follow.
1. I successfully created, installed and configured a Fedora 30 VM
2. I customized, and then sealed the Fedora 30 VM
3. I successfully made the template from the Fedora 30 sealed VM

I have issues after setting up cloud-init and expecting its settings to take effect.
My cloud-init is essentially as follows below.

Code:

Initial Run
  Use Cloud-Init/Sysprep: Checked
  Configure Time Zone
    Time Zone: (GMT-10:00) Hawaiian Standard Time
  Authentication
    User Name: foobar
    Password: password
  Custom Script
#cloud-config
runcmd:
 - [ date, >>, /var/cache/date.log ]

For reasons that I do not understand cloud-init fails with the below error.
IsADirectoryError: [Errno 21] Is a directory: '/var/lib/cloud/instance'

I have attached some relevant log files: cloud-init.log, cloud-init-output.log and var-lib-cloud.txt (an archive of /var/lib/cloud folder, to be renamed as var-lib-cloud.tar.gz).

Thanks in advance for any help and hints.

Ser Olmy · 10-02-2019, 08:38 PM

The logs are pretty clear: An attempt to delete /var/lib/cloud/instance fails, because it's a directory. And sure enough, in your .tar.gz file it is indeed an empty directory, so that delete operation is never going to work.

Whether /var/lib/cloud/instance should be a directory or not, or why cloud-init wants to delete it, I can't say.

Have you tried deleting or renaming the "instance" directory just to see what happens?

tshikose · 10-03-2019, 05:53 AM

Hi Ser Olmy,

I do appreciate that you took the time to respond to me.

Obviously, I did research before starting this thread.
From my readings, it seems as if the /var/lib/cloud/instance should have been a link to a file and not a directory.

The reality is, that /var/lib/cloud/instance not being owned by a package it should have been created by a script triggered by cloud-init.
Why it does create it incorrectly, I do not know.

I am not comfortable to delete it from the based machine from which a created the template.
The reason is that I do expect it to work out of the box, without too much fiddling.
Also remember that cloud-init is triggered at the very first boot to initialize the machine. At that stage I cannot even log in as the machine is still in its creation process.

Anyone else?