[Maas-devel] MAAS: my hands on look

[Francis J. Lacoste]

Hi Jon,

The current documentation on MAAS is available at https://maas.ubuntu.com/

It covers installing, adding nodes and deploying services to it through
Juju.

Cheers

On 12-04-29 07:40 PM, Jon wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> I originally posted this on reddit,
> http://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/sxmy4/maas_my_handson_look/ and
> was asked to post this here (then mistakenly posted this to the admin
> list...).
> I've removed the external links for readability (because I was copying this 
> into a web form at the time). 
> My biggest complaint is lack of documentation, and with the release of 12.04
> happening just days ago, I'm sure the docs are coming.  Thanks for
> making a great product, I can't wait to get MaaS working properly;  I'd
> love to sell the boss on a proper management solution.
> 
> Original Post:
> ----
> Ubuntu 12.04 has been released, and with it comes a number of
> advancements.
> One of the projects I am particularly interested in is the new MaaS
> (Metal as a Service) which integrates nicely with Juju for automatic
> deployment and administration of hardware. Because the project appears
> to be under development, some of the documentation is lacking. That's
> ok, I'm sure in time the docs will be updated.
> Installation of the base MaaS server is rather straight forward. It's
> almost the same process as standard server installation except the
> additional three or four MaaS screens. For some reason the MaaS install
> doesn't install the nice Ubuntu login screen when you ssh to a machine.
> It is possible to install Ubuntu server, then apt-get install maas. I
> believe this installs everything, but you may need to install maas-dhcp.
> At this point the, the docs say to run maas-import-isos then add your
> nodes. Two important points, 1) you can import nodes, but cannot
> comission them until the import is complete 2) you should add your SSH
> key (of the machine that is running juju as well as your machine) before
> you commission your nodes. Click the down arrow next to your username,
> select preferences and add key. Add your keys from .ssh/id_rsa.pub.
> When you create a node, currently, the only way to start up a machine is
> PXE boot, and MaaS must be the only DHCP server on the network. I don't
> know if WoL because I don't have any devices that support it at the
> moment. However, i can say using virsh to start VMs does not work.
> I am unclear how I got the one machine to change from "ready" to "in
> use" status... After the initial boot and install, I was unable to
> access my new node. I got as far as juju status where I received a
> "invalid ssh key" warning. Only after I rebooted this node, the node I
> can't get my second node to change from ready to deployed, and juju
> status hangs (I literally literally let it run for an hour before
> killing the process, I was able to see some traffic between the nodes,
> but the traffic continued after killing the juju process).
> One thing that really bugs me, is all of the services that are installed
> in non-standard locations. For instance maas-dhcp installs a DHCP
> server, but no information as to where the dhcp leases are stored, and
> as far as ps is concerned, there don't appear to be any processes with
> the letters dhcp in them:
> # ps aux | grep dhcp
>  root     11383  0.0  0.0   8096   932 pts/3    S+   19:31   0:00 grep
> --color=auto dhcp
> Installing the MaaS service also installs Cobbler and RabbitMQ, but
> information on accessing these systems is also non-existent, and apt
> doesn't even recognize they are installed.
> Overall, I think this is an awesome project, but needs some
> documentation.
> 
> 


-- 
Francis J. Lacoste
francis.lacoste at canonical.com

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