According to the Nova API there is supposed to be a file created called /meta.js on the destination instance when I perform a nova boot --meta and I cannot find it anywhere. See the screenshot of the nova boot below.

So I did some digging around and discovered the meta data service which is available at: http://169.254.169.254/openstack/

So I CURLed that URL and got the following results which look like dates.

2012-08-10
2013-04-04
2013-10-17

Today's 2014-03-27 which doesn't make much sense, but I'll byte. So I query the first one and get the following output:

{"uuid": "544b435e-1676-4f91-b19a-28eb32f70f6e", "availability_zone": "nova", "hostname": "thursday-2-with-meta.novalocal", "launch_index": 0, "meta": {"host_name": "www.server.com", "server_type": "web"}, "name": "Thursday 2 with Meta"}

Inside I find my metadata. If I query the other two I get similar information plus some random seed. I can also CURL the IP address directly at: http://169.254.169.254 and get more stuff.

So my question is, what do I do with this? Are those date values going to be consistent? Where is my /meta.js file. Anyone have some good tutorial on how the whole nova boot works?