Alex, I think that you should not have passed "--region 0". That caused us to attempt to create a new region rather than joining an existing one. Can you re-test without that parameter? I will also look into providing some feedback about incorrect combinations of parameters when using appliance_console_cli
So you can use the "--region" flag with an external database, but only if you want a new region created. My theory is that using that flag caused us to attempt to create a new region in the specified external database which failed because the database was already initialized, but we don't seem to be checking the result of that operation. Because we didn't see that the region create failed we attempted to start evmserverd with the *old* database.yml which made it look like the database was local. There may have been some additional information in the appliance_console.log file, but it would have been nice for it to be on the screen either way. If the command works without the "--region" flag we can probably close this (as this is labeled a blocker right now) and open a new bug for how we should handle that case which would be a lower priority and probably an RFE. What do you think?
Also, is there any documentation that describes what you tried as the correct command for joining an existing region? That would need to change.
Okay, in that case I'm going to close this as NOTABUG as the combination of parameters provided was working correctly (just not as you were expecting them to). I also made a change to improve error reporting in the case you hit here https://github.com/ManageIQ/manageiq/pull/9953
*** Bug 1331852 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***