[Maas-devel] Docs issues from the perspective of a new user.

[Mike Pontillo]

Hi Tom,

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 2:18 PM, Tom Denham <tom at tomdee.co.uk> wrote:

> I’ve started using MAAS and ran into a few problems getting it set up.
> I’ve done a quick write up of some of the issues that I hit, see below.
>
>
>
>
> http://www.tomdee.co.uk/2015/11/20/first-experience-of-using-metal-as-a-service-maas-from-ubuntu/
>
>
>

Thanks for the feedback. I wanted to address this portion of your blog post:

Once I got servers actually booting I ran into endless problems during the
> cloud-init about not being able to find files or servers. I was seeing
> various different errors but generally it was timing out trying to connect
> to servers. I was at a bit of a loss. Changing my interface settings had
> some effect on the IPs that the nodes were trying to connect to but still
> didn't resolve the problem.
>
>
> I got another VLAN set up and added another interface to my MAAS server. I
> allowed this interface to manage DHCP and DNS and tried again PXE booting
> servers. They booted, they got IP addresses on this new subnet but they
> were still failing with strange errors trying to connect odd IPs.
>

Coincidentally, I was working on reproducing a regression with unmanaged
networks that someone reported in the latest MAAS 1.9 RC, and I think I ran
across the same issue you described.[1] (This could be verified by checking
your /var/log/maas/regiond.log, if you still have your MAAS 1.8 setup
around.) I'm trying to get the fix merged for the next update to 1.8,[2] as
well as ensure it works for the coming 1.9 release. The take-away here is
to make sure you configure your cluster interfaces so that when each
potential node PXE boots, its IP address will fall within a known subnet on
the cluster.

To add to what Mark said, I would say that external DHCP is an ancillary
feature for MAAS. MAAS works much more seamlessly when it is able to manage
both the DHCP and DNS infrastructure on each cluster interface, so I
encourage you to set it up that way instead. (check the "management" option
under your cluster interface to be sure it's set to "DHCP and DNS".) I view
external DHCP as a "degraded mode"; it can be useful in some cases, but
it's not our focus (and can somewhat limit what you can do with MAAS).

Thanks again for the feedback, and thanks for trying MAAS. Keep in touch!

Regards,
Mike

[1]:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/maas/+bug/1519177

[2]:
https://code.launchpad.net/~mpontillo/maas/fix-1519177-1.8/+merge/278410
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