Ubuntu Wiki

Tips

I have followed the MAAS wiki to deploy a MAAS by using VirtualBox, and I had some simliar experience as in this article, there is a lot of great tips. I just only want to add a little more from my case.

• You have to change your network adaptor type in Advanced settings from "Intel PRO 1000 MT Desktop (b2540em)" (default one) to "PCnet-FAST III (Am79C973)" or other "PCnet" card, because the Intel ethernet card don't support PXE boot.

• Remove "local" from "Default domain for new nodes" in MAAS admin settings. This may confuse node to find master or not.

• When node start up, you may need to wait pretty long time for cloud init finish. Maybe 10 - 30 min or not, until this screen show up.

• Having a DHCP + DNS + PXE server is a must. For your lazyness, install maash-dhcp
• You should carefully check your dns to see if it could search in your domain. In my case, my node is named as node1.localdomain, I can not access the mysql database which is in node1 unless I remove '.localdomain' suffix in the file /etc/wordpress/config1-node1.localdomain.php, and rename it to 'config1-node1.php' (IIRC). Otherwise you may want to configure your domain search.

• When trying to test juju and MAAS, and when you execute commands like 'juju deploy, expose' etc, just wait, as the node1 is starting to download and install packages, you can run ssh ubuntu@node1 ps auxww to see if there is a 'apt-get' process running or not. You couldn't login as 'ubuntu' from node1, because 'ubuntu' don't have a password.

Problems

• After I run "juju bootstrap; juju status", it freezes without any feedback, "INFO: Connection to environments...".
• When Node VM booted from PXE, and it starts to download/install the image. After the installation, I don't know what's the username and password of node image.
  • 'ubuntu' is the only user that system created, no passoword for 'ubuntu'
• Did not figure out who's public key should be added in MAAS Dashboard.
  • This might be the public key of the user who will run 'juju' commands.
• There might be an additional steps for adding ECDSA key fingerprint, after accepting it, it prompts "ERROR: Invalid SSH Key"