Remove a machine

If you need to remove/decommission individual machines or a class of machines, there are several steps you need to go through.

Before you start, make sure that the machines are no longer needed for anything.

1. Remove the node from the puppetmaster

You need to remove the nodes from the puppet-master in each environment. This is needed to clean up exported resources from puppetdb, including removing checks from Icinga.

First disable puppet on the machines you wish to remove.

Next SSH into the puppetmaster for the environment:

$ ssh puppetmaster-1.management.production

Then run this for each machine:

$ govuk_node_clean <machine_name>

Where <machine_name> might be machine-name-1.vdc-name.production. To find the names of the machines, you can list the nodes on puppetmaster:

$ sudo puppet cert list --all

If ‘govuk_node_clean’ was successful, you will get output like:

Submitted 'deactivate node' for redirector-1.redirector.production with UUID 0fb445ff-d660-41eb-b6d2-eca40447d4bf
Notice: Revoked certificate with serial 127
Notice: Removing file Puppet::SSL::Certificate redirector-1.redirector.production at '/etc/puppet/ssl/ca/signed/redirector-1.redirector.production.pem'

After this, Icinga/Nagios will forget about the machine when it next runs Puppet. You can force this with:

$ ssh monitoring-1.management.production
$ govuk_puppet --test

You may need to wait a few minutes, but it should then disappear from the “Host Detail” page in Icinga/Nagios.

2. Remove from vCloud Director

Sign in to the vCloud Director instance for the given environment. Go to 'My Cloud’, search for the given machine, stop it, and then delete it.

3. Remove from govuk-provisioning

If your machine class matches a VDC, be careful not to remove firewall rules that apply to the VDC. See this PR for an example.

4. Remove from puppet

If you are removing the class of machines, you will need to remove the definitions from Puppet.