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tech

New MAAS features in 1.7.0

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MAAS 1.7.0 is close to its release date, which is set to coincide with Ubuntu 14.10’s release.

The development team has been hard at work and knocked out some amazing new features and improvements. Let me take you through some of them!

UI-based boot image imports

Previously, MAAS used to require admins to configure (well, hand-hack) a yaml file on each cluster controller that specified precisely which OSes, release and architectures to import. This has all been replaced with a very smooth new API that lets you simply click and go.

New image import configuration page
Click for bigger version

The different images available are driven by a “simplestreams” data feed maintained by Canonical. What you see here is a representation of what’s available and supported.

Any previously-imported images also show on this page, and you can see how much space they are taking up, and how many nodes got deployed using each image. All the imported images are automatically synced across the cluster controllers.

image-import

Once a new selection is clicked, “Apply changes” kicks off the import. You can see that the progress is tracked right here.

(There’s a little more work left for us to do to track the percentage downloaded.)

Robustness and event logs

MAAS now monitors nodes as they are deploying and lets you know exactly what’s going on by showing you an event log that contains all the important events during the deployment cycle.

node-start-log

You can see here that this node has been allocated to a user and started up.

Previously, MAAS would have said “okay, over to you, I don’t care any more” at this point, which was pretty useless when things start going wrong (and it’s not just hardware that goes wrong, preseeds often fail).

So now, the node’s status shows “Deploying” and you can see the new event log at the bottom of the node page that shows these actions starting to take place.

After a while, more events arrive and are logged:

node-start-log2

And eventually it’s completely deployed and ready to use:

node-start-log3

You’ll notice how quick this process is nowadays.  Awesome!

More network support

MAAS has nascent support for tracking networks/subnets and attached devices. Changes in this release add a couple of neat things: Cluster interfaces automatically have their networks registered in the Networks tab (“master-eth0” in the image), and any node network interfaces known to be attached to any of these networks are automatically linked (see the “attached nodes” column).  This makes even less work for admins to set up things, and easier for users to rely on networking constraints when allocating nodes over the API.

networks

Power monitoring

MAAS is now tracking whether the power is applied or not to your nodes, right in the node listing.  Black means off, green means on, and red means there was an error trying to find out.

powermon

Bugs squashed!

With well over 100 bugs squashed, this will be a well-received release.  I’ll post again when it’s out.

tech

Enabling KVM via VNC access on the Intel NUC and other hurdles

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While setting up my new NUCs to use with MAAS as a development deployment tool, I got very, very frustrated with the initial experience so I thought I’d write up some key things here so that others may benefit — especially if you are using MAAS.

First hurdle — when you hit ctrl-P at the boot screen it is likely to not work. This is because you need to disable the num lock.

Second hurdle — when you go and enable the AMT features it asks for a new password, but doesn’t tell you that it needs to contain upper case, lower case, numbers AND punctuation.

Third hurdle — if you want to use it headless like me, it’s a good idea to enable the VNC server.  You can do that with this script:

AMT_PASSWORD=<fill me in>
VNC_PASSWORD=<fill me in>
IP=N.N.N.N
wsman put http://intel.com/wbem/wscim/1/ips-schema/1/IPS_KVMRedirectionSettingData -h ${IP} -P 16992 -u admin -p ${AMT_PASSWORD} -k RFBPassword=${VNC_PASSWORD} &&\
 wsman put http://intel.com/wbem/wscim/1/ips-schema/1/IPS_KVMRedirectionSettingData -h ${IP} -P 16992 -u admin -p ${AMT_PASSWORD} -k Is5900PortEnabled=true &&\
 wsman put http://intel.com/wbem/wscim/1/ips-schema/1/IPS_KVMRedirectionSettingData -h ${IP} -P 16992 -u admin -p ${AMT_PASSWORD} -k OptInPolicy=false &&\
 wsman put http://intel.com/wbem/wscim/1/ips-schema/1/IPS_KVMRedirectionSettingData -h ${IP} -P 16992 -u admin -p ${AMT_PASSWORD} -k SessionTimeout=0 &&\
 wsman invoke -a RequestStateChange http://schemas.dmtf.org/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/CIM_KVMRedirectionSAP -h ${IP} -P 16992 -u admin -p ${AMT_PASSWORD} -k RequestedState=2

(wsman comes from the wsmancli package)

But there is yet another gotcha!  The VNC_PASSWORD must be no more than 8 characters and still meet the same requirements as the AMT password.

Once this is all done you should be all set to use this very fast machine with MAAS.