Bug in Google Public Cloud

On a blog of Google, you can read this letter dated March 13, 20 14, written by Benson Kalahar:

Dear Compute Engine Customers,

Today we discovered a serious issue with the gcutil moveinstances command: with the release of the new auto-delete feature for persistent disks, there is an unintended interaction that can result in accidental deletion of the disk(s) of the instance being moved.

This issue affects all versions of gcutil prior to 1.14.2. If you don’t use moveinstances, you are not affected; if you do use moveinstances, simply update gcloud or gcutil to the latest version to avoid the issue.

In older versions of gcutil, the tool relied on two separate API calls to delete an instance and its disk. This allowed gcutil to safely create a snapshot of the disk once the instance had been shut down, before deleting the persistent disk. Now that it is possible to set a persistent disk to be auto-deleted when an instance is deleted, the persistent disk is automatically deleted before gcutil can take a persistent disk snapshot. This results in gcutil moveinstances erroneously and permanently deleting the disk(s) of instances that have enabled the auto-delete feature, without first creating a persistent disk snapshot.

We have just released version 1.14.2 of gcutil that contains a fix for this problem. To see if your version is affected by this issue, run the “gcutil version” command, and ensure your version is at least this recent. We urge you to update gcutil immediately in order to prevent this issue from affecting you. If you are using gcloud, you can run the following command to update gcloud:

$ gcloud components update

If you would like to update a standalone version of gcutil, please review our documentation for instructions.

We hope this solution is straightforward, but if you have any questions or concerns regarding this issue, please email gc-team@google.com.

Warm Regards,

Benson Kalahar
Cloud Platform Support