MAAS

Starting nodes en mass without ssh keys gives bad error message

Bug #1293701 reported by Tycho Andersen on 2014-03-17

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #1439199: Imprecise error message when trying to deploy machines without having SSH keys. Edit Remove

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	MAAS	Triaged	Medium	Unassigned

Bug Description

A bulk node start gives me a little blue banner that says:

"""The action "Start selected nodes" could not be performed on 8 nodes because their state does not allow that action."""

Really the problem is that I don't have any ssh keys.

Tags:

Julian Edwards (julian-edwards) on 2014-03-18

Changed in maas:
status:	New → Triaged
importance:	Undecided → Medium

Raphaël Badin (rvb) on 2014-11-05

tags:

added: ui

Revision history for this message

Raphaël Badin (rvb) wrote on 2014-11-05:

This is a UX problem really: when a bulk action fails on multiple nodes, each failure might be for a different reason. Since we cannot simply aggregate all the messages in one giant message (because it would be a bit unreadable and potentially very long) we display a summary message that is not very informative.
I agree that we should improve this. Here are a few possibilities:
- Since the number of possible failures is limited, we could regroup the failures by type and display something like "The action 'xx' could not be performed on 3 nodes: on 2 nodes, it couldn't be performed because XYZ, on 1 node, because ABC. "
- We could simply aggregate all the failures and crop the resulting message; plus a tooltip to show the complete message.

Revision history for this message

Carla Berkers (carlaberkers) wrote on 2014-11-05:

Hi Tycho,

Thanks for filing a bug, this is indeed a UX problem!

We're looking at fixing it in two ways:
1. By improving the UI for actions/bulk actions - to make sure it is clear which actions you can take on a selection of nodes, and to prevent you from selecting an action that can't be executed.

2. By improving the notification system, Raphaëls suggestions seem sensible to me as short term improvements.
Not sure how long they take to implement and if that is worth the effort now since we are redesigning notifications and error messages in the coming weeks.

I'll tag the bug UX so I can take it into account when we are designing.
Thanks,
Carla

Revision history for this message

Carla Berkers (carlaberkers) wrote on 2014-11-05:

Oh - and the SSH key notification not appearing is definitely something we need to address as well! Raphaël is that something we can address within the current notification system?

Revision history for this message

Raphaël Badin (rvb) wrote on 2014-11-05:

> Oh - and the SSH key notification not appearing is definitely something we need to address as well! Raphaël is that something we can address within the current notification system?

Like I said in https://bugs.launchpad.net/maas/+bug/1320555/comments/5, I'm a bit surprised to see that the tooltip is not working. We can certainly add a warning at the top of the page but (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/maas/+bug/1320555/comments/6) I wonder if that's appropriate.