# Reduce minimum\_master\_nodes without starting enough nodes

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/reduce-minimum-master-nodes-without-starting-enough-nodes/20491>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [October 30, 2014, 4:51am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/reduce-minimum-master-nodes-without-starting-enough-nodes/20491 "2014-10-30T04:51:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Andre\_Hansel](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/andre_hansel/32/934_2.png) [@Andre\_Hansel](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Andre_Hansel)\
**Post date:** [October 30, 2014, 4:51am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/reduce-minimum-master-nodes-without-starting-enough-nodes/20491/1 "2014-10-30T04:51:53Z")

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I set minimum\_master\_nodes to 100 instead of 10. 😕 Now my PUT  
\_cluster/settings call doesn't work anymore. Can I reduce  
minimum\_master\_nodes somehow without actually spinning up 100 nodes?

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**Author:** ![Boaz\_Leskes](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/boaz_leskes/32/723_2.png) [@Boaz\_Leskes](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Boaz_Leskes)\
**Post date:** [November 2, 2014, 7:56pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/reduce-minimum-master-nodes-without-starting-enough-nodes/20491/2 "2014-11-02T19:56:02Z")

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Hi Andre,

Sadly you need an active master to change settings that were introduced  
through the API and the min\_master\_nodes settings update caused the master  
to step down and prevents a new one from being elected. I think this is  
trappy and I opened a PR to protect against it  
: [Don't accept a dynamic update to `min_master_nodes` which is larger then current master node count by bleskes · Pull Request #8321 · elastic/elasticsearch · GitHub](https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/pull/8321)

You can recover you data by wiping the cluster state files from disk and  
letting the indices be imported (i.e., dangling indices) but it's tricky  
and very sensitive to mistakes. Let me know if you want to try that out.

Cheers,  
Boaz

On Thursday, October 30, 2014 5:51:54 AM UTC+1, André Hänsel wrote:

> I set minimum\_master\_nodes to 100 instead of 10. 😕 Now my PUT  
> \_cluster/settings call doesn't work anymore. Can I reduce  
> minimum\_master\_nodes somehow without actually spinning up 100 nodes?

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For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/d/optout](https://groups.google.com/d/optout).

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 12:52am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/reduce-minimum-master-nodes-without-starting-enough-nodes/20491/3 "2017-07-06T00:52:37Z")

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