Comment 4 for bug 1999680

l33tname, can you explain what you're trying to accomplish? `cloud-init clean --machine-id` needs to be called by something in order for this to affect anything. Are you calling that command to create a golden image, and your golden image isn't working? Are you launching a cloud image on a cloud that isn't booting correctly? Are you installing Ubuntu using an installer and it resulted in no machine id?

We need to understand the use case to know if this particular flag is a problem, or if we need to redirect your problem to another project.