I installed Ubuntu 14.04 with MAAS

Question

Everything seemed to go well, but when I try to commission a node the machines PXE boot to login and then shutdown. I have commissioned three. All have been allocated but they all boot to login prompt and then shutdown. I did a standard install. I'm not sure what log you'd like to see. I've looked at logs in /var/log/maas, but I don't see anything that jumps out at me. My nodes consist of an older Dell and two older Compaqs. All PXE boot with only one error they all share (makes me think the problem is with the maas server). The error is

Starting seed the pseudo random number generator on first boot  [fail].

This message shows up a few lines sooner but then gives the [ok] messages. All nodes receive DHCP assigned address without issue.

What am I over looking? Thank you.

Answer 1

I think you can safely ignore the "pseudo random number" thing. All of mine do that (about eight nodes so far).

Believe it or not, this is the expected behavior at this point. The machine wakes up, checks in with MAAS, gets a temporary IP address, downloads some code, reports back its resources (you should see the RAM, number of cores and hard disk space in the console) and then... it shuts down.

If you have your BIOS set correctly then it will wake up again as required from MAAS. BIOS should have the S3 option set in the Power-related section. In many cases you'd set it so that it will boot up without complaining if there's no keyboard (in the POST section). And just make sure that Wake On LAN (Onboard LAN Boot ROM) is set in the Integrated Peripherals section.

The commissioning step simply checks the system initially and I believe it also installs the Ubuntu system as well and runs update. If you then click the Acquire button it will give the IP adapter an IP address with a longer lease (or perhaps a static IP address in this case) so that you can then, in theory, ssh to the box. Note that you'll need to do an ssh-keygen in order to create a key pair and then paste that into the MAAS console in the SSH key area. This should allow you then to do a:

ssh [email protected]

...answer the yes/no question about whether or not you want to connect and then use the passphrase that you provided earlier in that ssh-keygen step. So at this point then you'd have commissioned and provisioned an Ubuntu server and connected to it via ssh, the goal of a successful MAAS install.

So then if you want to continue on and install OpenStack on top of all this (assuming that you have two or more nodes now happy), you'd RELEASE that node so that it's back again in the READY state and can be deployed by Juju.