Better error message for out-of-order operations in machine lifecycle

Hey folks,

We’re powering through our PoC of MaaS to deploy Rocky*; now that we’ve gotten over the hump with initial ACL and configuration issues, it’s great to see how effortlessly we can build out and deploy machines.

Small error messaging request - when in the UI and doing lifecycle operations that don’t make sense, the error messages are extremely vague. In my case, I tried a Deploy action on a node that was already deployed and got a very general error message of, “Action failed for 1 machine”. The same occurs if you try to Release an already released node.

Not a huge deal really - this is obviously a newbie thing to try - but I think that adding more specific error messages will help people using the UI that are just trying out MaaS for the first time. At times during our PoC, the number of little things that we ran into like this added up to a material slowdown on getting the system functioning.

Thanks!

Similarly, when trying to commission a machine whose IPMI information I just manually added, if I type the IPMI “power user” or “power password” incorrectly and then try “Take Action -> Commission”, I get the error “No rack controllers can access the BMC of node nearby-mantis” which sounded to me like there was a networking issue and it couldn’t reach the machine. In fact, it could reach the machine, but it simply couldn’t authenticate. While “access” may not be an inaccurate word to use here, a more detailed error message may have been able to steer me towards the problem (and solution) quicker.

Thanks!