maas-devel team mailing list archive

[Gavin Panella <gavin.panella@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11 July 2012 10:50, Kevin Jackson <kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
> I'll jump in at this point - I gave up on using MAAS as I could never get
> past this issue.  I had issues troubleshooting what seemed to be a basic
> task: provision a server and then the output of such tools suggests the
> machine is ready.  The bootstrap instance becomes a black-box and you can't
> expect a user to keep ssh'ing to see its up.  Or do you?

We kind of do :-/ I know that's not ideal, especially as it can take
quite a lot of time for a machine to go from allocated to actually
ready to use.

There are two things we plan to do to improve this: speed up the
installer (a lot, by taking the same approach as the Ubuntu desktop
installer), and maintaining a pool of pre-installed machines.

This will let us allocate machines that are ready to use, or ready
within a very short time.

> To a user, this expectation isn't managed very well and personally I think
> should be addressed.  When I provision other nodes in my cloud environment,
> within a few seconds I can SSH in.  That's *my* expectation unless some
> output from a tool tells me differently.

That's our expectation for MAAS too, but we're obviously not there
yet. One of MAAS's primary goals is to support Juju, and that expects
machines to take a while to come up; even a delay of a few seconds is
a delay for Juju, hence it knows how to deal with it. So these long
delays haven't been a massive problem so far. For people using MAAS
without Juju it's obvious that they're a bigger problem.

Gavin.