ES 6.2.1 Unable to reindex due to unavailable_shards_exception

[ld_pvl]

Hi Team,

I am trying to reindex from a source "A" index to dest "B" index - this has worked before but suddenly it throws me the unavailable_shards_exception exception now and am not sure why.

The cluster health is green. I am able to search the old index for that particular doc ID. The cluster is not hitting any disk space watermarks. Below is an example error for a doc:

{
  "index" : "my_old_index_A",
  "type" : "metrics",
  "id" : "mydocid-1515747420",
  "cause" : {
    "type" : "unavailable_shards_exception",
    "reason" : "[my_new_index_B][0] primary shard is not active Timeout: [1m], request: [BulkShardRequest [[my_new_index_B][0]] containing [1000] requests]"
  },
  "status" : 503
},

The new index B gets created but no docs are being saved and the cluster just turns to Red, all I can see in the logs is:

... creating index, cause [auto(bulk api)], templates [some templates], shards [1]/[1], mappings [metrics]
... Cluster health status changed from [YELLOW] to [RED] (reason: [index [my_new_index_B] created]).

The body of the reindex request is fairly simple:

{
  "source": {
    "index": "my_old_index_A"
  },
  "dest": {
    "index": "my_new_index_B"
  },
  "script": {
    "lang": "painless",
    "source": "some nicely looking painless script here"
  }
}

Please help

[ld_pvl]

I got it I think.

My index B reqiures a node of a certain type which I have not spun up yet.

I bamboozled myself again.