maas-devel team mailing list archive

[John Meinel <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 10:54 AM, Mike Pontillo <mike.pontillo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:27 PM, John A Meinel <john.meinel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > wrote:
>
>> Its a little clumsy to start a node, then click through to get to set the
>> "power settings" to VIRSH and copy the same virsh string and set the new
>> name of the machine. It feels like something where MAAS could be aware of a
>> VIRSH system, rather than treating each machine that is started
>> independently.
>
>
> Which version of MAAS are you using?
>
> You can use the "Add Hardware > Chassis" command (in 1.8+) to add a virsh
> system to MAAS. It will automatically discover and add to MAAS all the VMs
> it can see (and set the boot order properly as well - in addition to using
> the hostnames defined on the hypervisor).
>

Thanks for the pointer. I tried it, and I have a bit of feedback:

   1. The "address" field doesn't have any real verification, and there is
   no feedback (that I found) about what MAAS is doing when it tries to add
   the chassis. So I don't know if I typed a valid string and it didn't find
   anything, and invalid one and it didn't do anything,  etc.
   2. I think I did get the right string, and the first thing it did was
   kill my maas-region-controller VM. I assume it is trying to power cycle
   everything so that they PXE boot and get registered? But it needs to be
   aware (somehow) that it could itself be in that VM set. I can probably use
   the prefix filter, though that does require planning ahead on node names.
   3. Having it take you to some sort of "here is the progress as I analyze
   this chassis" page would be a great bit of visibility and feedback as to
   what is going on.
   4. Oddly, when I switched to using prefix filtering, I didn't notice
   maas starting any of the other nodes. Maybe it only tries to stop them all?


As an aside, what does "Keep network configuration during commissioning"
actually mean? Does it mean "keep the configuration I set before running
commissioning"? Does it mean "save the values that are determined while
configuring"? Does it mean "ignore the values you determine during
configuration"? I wasn't able to find any help text or online documentation
about them. (quick googling for those strings just shows the release page
where they were added, but doesn't explain what they actually do.)


By the way, I hope all of this is coming across as a constructive
discussion. I'm trying to give feedback on some of the sharp edges I've
come across, not trying to say what you have isn't pretty darn great.

John
=:->



> But you're correct that it woudl be better if MAAS was "more aware"; that
> is, if MAAS remembered that there was a virsh system, and could later check
> for new machines. (This is something we'd like to take on in the future.)
>
> I agree about the ease (or lack thereof) of setting up SSH access for
> virsh. In MAAS 1.9, you'll notice that we prompt the user with
> notifications indicating what they should install, if we can detect that
> dependencies are unmet.
>
> Regards,
> Mike
>