Remove inaccessible Mongo shard

Question

I have a MongoDB sharded setup with 3 shards: shard0000, shard0001 and shard0002. The machine that runs shard0002 is down now, which causes all my queries to fail. I'd like to temporarily remove shard0002 from my setup and keep working with the first two shards. That should be doable assuming I only use unsharded collections that reside in the first two shards, right?

What I tried first is: db.runCommand({removeshard: 'IP:PORT'}) which obviously doesn't help, because it just puts the shard in draining mode, which will never end (since it's down). Then I tried connected to my config server and did db.shards.remove({_id: 'shard0002'}) on the config DB then restart mongos so it reloads the config. Now whenever I try to do anything I get "can't find shard for: shard0002".

Is there any way to just let Mongo know that I don't care about that shard for now, then re-enable it later when it becomes available.

Answer 1

Manually modify the the shard entry in the config db, then removeshard