Manual remote bootstrap of failed peer

When a Raft peer fails, YugabyteDB executes an automatic remote bootstrap to create a new peer from the remaining ones.

If a majority of Raft peers fail for a given tablet, you need to manually execute a remote bootstrap. A list of tablets is available via the yb-master-ip:7000/tablet-replication yb-admin UI.

Assume you have a cluster where the following applies:

• Replication factor is 3.
• A tablet with UUID TABLET1.
• Three tablet peers, with one in good working order, referred to as NODE_GOOD, and two broken peers referred to as NODE_BAD1 and NODE_BAD2.
• Some of the tablet-related data is to be copied from the good peer to each of the bad peers until the majority of them are restored.

These are the steps to follow:

• Delete the tablet from the broken peers if necessary, by running:

  yb-ts-cli --server_address=NODE_BAD1 delete_tablet TABLET1
  yb-ts-cli --server_address=NODE_BAD2 delete_tablet TABLET1
  

• Trigger a remote bootstrap of TABLET1 from NODE_GOOD to NODE_BAD1.

  yb-ts-cli --server_address=NODE_BAD1 remote_bootstrap NODE_GOOD TABLET1
  

After the remote bootstrap finishes, NODE_BAD2 should be automatically removed from the quorum and TABLET1 fixed, as it has gotten a majority of healthy peers.

If you can't perform the preceding steps, you can do the following to manually execute the equivalent of a remote bootstrap:

• On NODE_GOOD, create an archive of the WALS (Raft data), RocksDB (regular) directories, intents (transactions data), and snapshots directories for TABLET1.

• Copy these archives over to NODE_BAD1, on the same drive that TABLET1 currently has its Raft and RocksDB data.

• Stop NODE_BAD1, as the file system data underneath will change.

• Remove the old WALS, RocksDB, intents, snapshots data for TABLET1 from NODE_BAD1.

• Unpack the data copied from NODE_GOOD into the corresponding (now empty) directories on NODE_BAD1.

• Restart NODE_BAD1 so it can bootstrap TABLET1 using this new data.

• Restart NODE_GOOD so it can properly observe the changed state and data on NODE_BAD1.

At this point, NODE_BAD2 should be automatically removed from the quorum and TABLET1 fixed, as it has gotten a majority of healthy peers.

Note that typically, when you try to find tablet data, you would use a find command across the --fs_data_dir paths.

In the following example, assume that is set to /mnt/d0 and your tablet UUID is c08596d5820a4683a96893e092088c39:

find /mnt/d0/ -name '*c08596d5820a4683a96893e092088c39*'
/mnt/d0/yb-data/tserver/wals/table-2fa481734909462385e005ba23664537/tablet-c08596d5820a4683a96893e092088c39
/mnt/d0/yb-data/tserver/tablet-meta/c08596d5820a4683a96893e092088c39
/mnt/d0/yb-data/tserver/consensus-meta/c08596d5820a4683a96893e092088c39
/mnt/d0/yb-data/tserver/data/rocksdb/table-2fa481734909462385e005ba23664537/tablet-c08596d5820a4683a96893e092088c39
/mnt/d0/yb-data/tserver/data/rocksdb/table-2fa481734909462385e005ba23664537/tablet-c08596d5820a4683a96893e092088c39.intents
/mnt/d0/yb-data/tserver/data/rocksdb/table-2fa481734909462385e005ba23664537/tablet-c08596d5820a4683a96893e092088c39.snapshots

The data you would be interested is the following:

• For the Raft WALS:

  /mnt/d0/yb-data/tserver/wals/table-2fa481734909462385e005ba23664537/tablet-c08596d5820a4683a96893e092088c39
  

• For the RocksDB regular database:

  /mnt/d0/yb-data/tserver/data/rocksdb/table-2fa481734909462385e005ba23664537/tablet-c08596d5820a4683a96893e092088c39
  

• For the intents files:

  /mnt/d0/yb-data/tserver/data/rocksdb/table-2fa481734909462385e005ba23664537/tablet-c08596d5820a4683a96893e092088c39.intents
  

• For the snapshot files:

  /mnt/d0/yb-data/tserver/data/rocksdb/table-2fa481734909462385e005ba23664537/tablet-c08596d5820a4683a96893e092088c39.snapshots