commissioning fails silently if a node can't reach the region controller

This bug was originally filed in Launchpad as [LP: #1303925](https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-init/+bug/1303925)

Launchpad details

affected_projects = ['maas']

assignee = None

assignee_name = None

date_closed = None

date_created = 2014-04-07T17:39:11.416336+00:00

date_fix_committed = None

date_fix_released = None

id = 1303925

importance = low

is_complete = False

lp_url = https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-init/+bug/1303925

milestone = None

owner = julian-edwards

owner_name = Julian Edwards

private = False

status = triaged

submitter = elmo

submitter_name = James Troup

tags = ['canonical-is', 'provisioning', 'robustness']

duplicates = []

_Launchpad user **James Troup(elmo)** wrote on 2014-04-07T17:39:11.416336+00:00_

We recently had a node which completely refused to commission in MAAS.
After (literally) several man days of debugging, we figured out that
it was because the node couldn't talk to the region controller over
HTTP.

Obviously, that's ultimately our mistake/problem, but MAAS could have
been a lot better at helping us to help ourselves; currently, there's
absolutely no indication from the boot process that the HTTP
connection to the region controller is the problem.

Attached is the serial console output (from the point of boot) for the
node that was failing to commission. 91.189.94.35 is the MAAS region
controller and 91.189.88.20 is the MAAS cluster controller.