maas-devel team mailing list archive

[Jon <three18ti@xxxxxxxxx>]

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.