So this one is pretty simple. However, I found a lot of misinformation along the way, so I figured that I would jot the proper (and most simple) process here.
Symptoms: an RHEL (or variant) VM that takes a very long time to boot. On the VM console, you can see the following output while the VM boot process is stalled and waiting for a timeout. Note that the message below has nothing to do with cloud-init, but it's the output that I have most often seen on the console while waiting for a VM to boot.
[106.325574} random: crng init done
Note that I have run into this issue in both OpenStack (when booting from external provider networks) and in KVM.
Upon initial boot of the VM, run the command below.
13:18:01 alvaro@lykan /home/alvaro/Documents/2post
$ sudo dnf install libguestfs libguestfs-tools openssl
Last metadata expiration check: 1:53:31 ago on Mon 16 Jul 2018 01:51:05 PM CDT.
Package libguestfs-1:1.38.2-1.fc27.x86_64 is already installed, skipping.
Package libguestfs-tools-1:1.38.2-1.fc27.noarch is already installed, skipping.
Package openssl-1:1.1.0h-3.fc27.x86_64 is already installed, skipping.
Dependencies resolved.
Nothing to do.
Complete!
13:18:26 alvaro@lykan /home/alvaro/Documents/2post
$ guestfish --rw -a ../../Downloads/CentOS-7-x86_64-GenericCloud-1805.qcow2
Welcome to guestfish, the guest filesystem shell for
editing virtual machine filesystems and disk images.Type: ‘help’ for help on commands
‘man’ to read the manual
‘quit’ to quit the shell>
run
100% ⟦▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒⟧ 00:00
>list-filesystems
/dev/sda1: xfs
>mount /dev/sda1 /
>touch /etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled
>quit
Seriously, that’s it. No need to disable or remove cloud-init services.
