How to remove a configuration and node from Automation State Configuration

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This article covers how to unregister a node managed by Automation State Configuration, and safely remove a PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) configuration from managed nodes. For both Windows and Linux nodes, you need to unregister the node and Delete a configuration from the node. For Linux nodes only, you can optionally delete the DSC packages from the nodes as well. See Remove the DSC package from a Linux node.

Unregister a node

Note

Unregistering a node from the service only sets the Local Configuration Manager settings so the node is no longer connecting to the service. This does not effect the configuration that's currently applied to the node, and leaves the related files in place on the node. After you unregister/delete the node, to re-register it, clear the existing configuration files. See Delete a configuration from the node.

If you no longer want a node to be managed by State Configuration (DSC), you can unregister it from the Azure portal or with Azure PowerShell using the following steps.

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal.

  2. Search for and select Automation Accounts.

  3. On the Automation Accounts page, select your Automation account from the list.

  4. From your Automation account, select State configuration (DSC) under Configuration Management.

  5. On the State configuration (DSC) page, click the Nodes tab.

  6. On the Nodes tab, select the name of the node you want to unregister.

  7. On the pane for that node, click Unregister.

    Screenshot of the Node details page highlighting the Unregister button.

Delete a configuration from the node

When you're ready to remove an imported DSC configuration document (which is a Managed Object Format (MOF) or .mof file) that's assigned to one or more nodes, follow either of these steps.

You can delete configurations for both Windows and Linux nodes from the Azure portal.

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal.

  2. Search for and select Automation Accounts.

  3. On the Automation Accounts page, select your Automation account from the list.

  4. From your Automation account, select State configuration (DSC) under Configuration Management.

  5. On the State configuration (DSC) page, click the Configurations tab, then select the name of the configuration you want to delete.

    Screenshot of configurations tab.

  6. On the configuration's detail page, click Delete to remove the configuration.

    Screenshot of deleting an extension.

Re-register a node

You can re-register a node just as you registered the node initially, using any of the methods described in Enable Azure Automation State Configuration

Remove the DSC package from a Linux node

This step is optional. Unregistering a Linux node from State Configuration (DSC) doesn't remove the DSC and OMI packages from the machine. Use the commands below to remove the packages as well as all logs and related data.

To find the package names and other relevant details, see the PowerShell Desired State Configuration for Linux GitHub repository.

RPM-based systems

rpm -e <package name>

dpkg-based systems

dpkg -P <package name>

Next steps