pallet/pallet — Issue #95: Spot instances failing to bootstrap
Author: bmabey
Created: 2011-10-11 16:00:11+00:00
State: open

My cluster generally consists of 20+ spot instances. It isn't unusual for a spot instance never to respond to SSH. I've ran into this with other frameworks so I know it is an AWS issue. I believe this is what is happening when I get the following error from pallet:

```
com.jcraft.jsch.JSchException: Auth fail
```

Full stack trace [here](https://gist.github.com/1276546).

In `#pallet` it was suggested that this error manifests when bootstraping times out. The big problem with pallet now is that when a single node errs/times out like this the entire converge/lift process is halted leaving the remaing good nodes useless as well.

In the past I have found the toublesome node and restarted it. Restarting the node seems to always fix the problem. You could terminate the node and start a new one but restarting it would save time and money (admittedly, not a lot of money).