sd card picked for root device with custom images

[Paul Larson]

We have several desktop images that we've converted with curtinator and uploaded, which we use for testing on various systems. On one of the new systems we added, we need to keep an SD card in it for testing purposes. When we try to install one of those images though, the maas install tries to provision the SD card as the root device. Since it's only 4GB or so, it runs out of space very quickly and fails - and that's certainly not the device we want to use anyway since this system also has a 1TB drive in it.

I've tried removing the device from the storage tab, or telling it to partition some space and mount it as /test, but for custom images, maas seems to ignore the storage layout.

$ dpkg -l '*maas*'|cat
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-===============================-====================================-============-=================================================
ii maas 2.3.0-6434-gd354690-0ubuntu1~16.04.1 all "Metal as a Service" is a physical cloud and IPAM
ii maas-cli 2.3.0-6434-gd354690-0ubuntu1~16.04.1 all MAAS client and command-line interface
un maas-cluster-controller <none> <none> (no description available)
ii maas-common 2.3.0-6434-gd354690-0ubuntu1~16.04.1 all MAAS server common files
ii maas-dhcp 2.3.0-6434-gd354690-0ubuntu1~16.04.1 all MAAS DHCP server
ii maas-dns 2.3.0-6434-gd354690-0ubuntu1~16.04.1 all MAAS DNS server
ii maas-proxy 2.3.0-6434-gd354690-0ubuntu1~16.04.1 all MAAS Caching Proxy
ii maas-rack-controller 2.3.0-6434-gd354690-0ubuntu1~16.04.1 all Rack Controller for MAAS
ii maas-region-api 2.3.0-6434-gd354690-0ubuntu1~16.04.1 all Region controller API service for MAAS
ii maas-region-controller 2.3.0-6434-gd354690-0ubuntu1~16.04.1 all Region Controller for MAAS
un maas-region-controller-min <none> <none> (no description available)
un python-django-maas <none> <none> (no description available)
un python-maas-client <none> <none> (no description available)
un python-maas-provisioningserver <none> <none> (no description available)
ii python3-django-maas 2.3.0-6434-gd354690-0ubuntu1~16.04.1 all MAAS server Django web framework (Python 3)
ii python3-maas-client 2.3.0-6434-gd354690-0ubuntu1~16.04.1 all MAAS python API client (Python 3)
ii python3-maas-provisioningserver 2.3.0-6434-gd354690-0ubuntu1~16.04.1 all MAAS server provisioning libraries (Python 3)

[Paul Larson (pwlars)]

I'm not seeing a lot in maas.log, regiond.log, etc so far. At this early point in the installation, most of the interesting bits seem to be in rsyslog, which is very long as soon is it starts running out of space. Here's a snippit from the end of it trying to extract the image and running out of space:
May 3 16:16:02 saved-minnow-201606-22459 cloud-init[2196]: 1370112K ........ ..
...... ........ ........ ........ ........ 98% 11.9M 10s
May 3 16:16:02 saved-minnow-201606-22459 cloud-init[2196]: 1373184K ........ ..
...... ........ ........ ........ ........ 98% 11.2M 8s
May 3 16:16:06 saved-minnow-201606-22459 cloud-init[2196]: 1376256K ........ ..
...... ........ ........ ........ ........ 99% 827K 7s
May 3 16:16:12 saved-minnow-201606-22459 cloud-init[2196]: 1379328K ........ ..
...... ........ ........ ........ .tar: ./usr/share/terminfo/x/xnuppc-m: Cannot write: No space left on device
May 3 16:16:12 saved-minnow-201606-22459 cloud-init[2196]: tar: ./usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm-xmc: Cannot write: No space left on device
May 3 16:16:12 saved-minnow-201606-22459 cloud-init[2196]: tar: ./usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm+kbs: Cannot write: No space left on device
May 3 16:16:12 saved-minnow-201606-22459 cloud-init[2196]: tar: ./usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm+pce1: Cannot write: No space left on device
May 3 16:16:12 saved-minnow-201606-22459 cloud-init[2196]: tar: ./usr/share/ter

[Lee Trager (ltrager)]

MAAS only supports custom storage configuration on Ubuntu images from the stream. Other images use a flat layout on the first disk. My guess is the first disk that is enumerating on the system is the SD card.

[Andres Rodriguez (andreserl)]

I’ve a feeling we’ve seen this before and not quite sure here whether curtin should at all pick a sd card for the installation, ever, unless it gets specifically told so.

[Ryan Harper (raharper)]

An install log would be useful.

Some possible improvements here could be:

- curtin can add some additional heuristics for block-meta simple mode; size, speed, rotational, etc; but that's not always going to be right.

- maas could send custom storage config, and curtin could then apply the storage config before dding to a specified device;

Lastly, I think this problem can be resolved by selecting the boot device in MAAS.

Curtin has code which looks at storage config and finds a disk with a serial and grub_device: true, it will pick that as the target device for dd'ing the image.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for curtin because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Adam Collard (adam-collard)]

This bug has not seen any activity in the last 6 months, so it is being automatically closed.

If you are still experiencing this issue, please feel free to re-open.

MAAS Team