Why are my MaaS nodes stuck at the commissioning stage?

Question

I'm attempting to set MAAS up on an older HP blade center. The nodes are stuck on commissioning. The nodes do PXE boot and seem to load ephemeral. They just never finish.

As a test, I tried installing the regular LTS server on one of the nodes. I received the message that "Some of your hardware needs non-free firmware to operate" In particular, it's calling for the tigon tg3 network driver firmware.

Could it be that MAAS is stuck for the same reason? If so, how can I include or reference the tigon tg3 firmware in MAAS?

Answer 1

This answer is incomplete and unfinished

I think that would explain the problem, yes. MAAS is stuck waiting for the nodes to boot up, perform some simple self-test tasks, and call back to the server. But if they get stuck, or have no network access, then there's no way for commissioning to complete.