Documented how to detech shadowed overlays in troubleshooting

Signed-off-by: Jonathon Anderson <janderson@ciq.com>
This commit is contained in:
Jonathon Anderson
2026-03-18 13:51:22 -06:00
parent 4f506e1b16
commit c13c94ff85
2 changed files with 51 additions and 0 deletions

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@@ -195,6 +195,56 @@ investigate:
- Sometimes you need to add ``should_exist: "true"`` for the swap partition as
well.
Overlay Shadowing
=================
When Warewulf introduced the distinction between distribution overlays and site
overlays, existing installations that had modified any distribution overlays
were left with those modified files in the site overlay directory (typically
``/var/lib/warewulf/overlays/``). Because a site overlay takes complete
precedence over a distribution overlay with the same name — with no merging of
individual files — the entire distribution overlay is shadowed. Any new files
or updates added to the distribution overlay in a subsequent Warewulf upgrade
will be hidden as long as a site overlay of the same name exists.
To check whether any distribution overlays are being shadowed by site overlays,
use ``wwctl overlay list``, which includes a ``SITE`` column:
.. code-block::
wwctl overlay list
Any overlay showing ``true`` in the ``SITE`` column that you did not
intentionally create locally may be unintentionally shadowing its distribution
counterpart.
To see which files are present in a site overlay, use the ``--all`` flag:
.. code-block::
wwctl overlay list --all <overlay_name>
To see the filesystem paths of the overlays directly, use the ``--path`` flag:
.. code-block::
wwctl overlay list --path
If you determine that a site overlay is unintentionally shadowing a
distribution overlay, you can restore the distribution overlay by deleting the
site overlay. Back up any intentional local modifications first, then delete
the site overlay:
.. code-block::
wwctl overlay delete <overlay_name>
``wwctl overlay delete`` only ever deletes site overlays, so this command is
safe to run without risk of removing the underlying distribution overlay. After
deleting the site overlay, ``wwctl overlay list`` should show ``false`` in the
``SITE`` column for that overlay, confirming that the distribution overlay is
now active.
Running Containers on Cluster Nodes
===================================