Appscale does not start when server IP changes

[Ravi K]

We have a demo Ubuntu server running appscale. When the box is taken from one LAN to another for eg.:

Location A

- installed appscale on ubuntu box

- dhcp assigned ip address - 192.168.2.17

- run fast-start and this generated AppScalefile containing the above ip

- deploy the app it works fine

- power down

Location B

- start ubuntu box

- DHCP assigns ip address 192.168.1.13

- appscale fails to start

- we manually update AppScalefile with new ip

- reboot

at this point the app is not automatically deployed:

notice the ip address is still the previous one. so we try to do a clean

but this fails as well. it appears the IP is cached somewhere else deeper other than the AppScalefile. is there a quick way to clean this?

at this time the only solution we know is to reinstall ubuntu and appscale from  scratch - which means we have lose all the data and start again.

[chris....@appscale.com]

This issue was resolved in a separate thread, but I'm pasting the info here to close the loop.

The other cache you mention is located at ~/.appscale/locations-<your-keyname>.json on the machine you are using the tools on. The file was created for cloud deployments in order to keep track of IP addresses in a cloud deployment that aren't listed in the AppScalefile. It definitely needs some work in order to handle situations like the one you described.

You can also perform a "down" without using the tools by running the AppController/terminate.rb script on all the machines in the deployment. For a "down --clean", you would run `ruby /root/appscale/AppController/terminate.rb clean`. Just keep in mind that a clean will remove all application data, user data, and logs.

For this use case, I would recommend doing an `appscale down` before stopping the machine the first time. After restarting the machine with a new IP address, remove the ~/.appscale/locations-<keyname>.json file, modify the AppScalefile with the new IP address, and do an `appscale up`. The app should get automatically deployed, and it should retain all of its data.