[feature] Add the ability to commission a deployed system

[Lee Trager]

A user on discourse[1] has requested the ability to commission a deployed machine so MAAS always has up to date hardware information. This can be useful to gather serial numbers and firmware versions of replaced hardware as well as when increasing RAM.

Most commissions scripts can be safely run on a deployed system. However the networking and storage hooks would have to be modified to handle replaced devices without destroying the current configuration.

[1] https://discourse.maas.io/t/update-hardware-info/320

[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

[Sandor Zeestraten (szeestraten)]

@adam-collard, this is a feature request, not an issue that is should expire after 6 months. If you do not want to implement this feature than that is fine, but please say so.

[Mark Cunningham (mdscunningham)]

Modifying this request slightly, rather than finding a way to re-commission a node while it is deployed, it would be to have the deploy automatically update hardware information or at least skip comparison of drive serial numbers. In MAAS 2.8.2 if a machine is released, and a drive is replaced or otherwise is seen with a new serial number MAAS will fail to redeploy that node presenting an error about not finding the drive device that was replaced. This is only resolved by recommissioning the machine to update this hardware information.

More specifically, the issue at hand is that one drive in the machine is a virtual disk presented by a special Dell raid card (BOSS - https://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/Documents/Dell-PowerEdge-Boot-Optimized-Storage-Solution.pdf). This virtual disk is basically presenting a new serial number each time the raid is rebuilt/reconfigured, which happens every time the the machine is released (related to other issues with secure erase needing to be done outside of MAAS). With this new generated serial number MAAS then says it cannot find the disk that existed during the previous commissioning, and thus requires the machine to be recommissioned before it can successfully be redeployed.

The request here would be to know whether or not this recommission after pseudo or actual drive replacement can be skipped by skipping some internal drive serial number comparison in MAAS. Otherwise this is a feature request to have an option to skip hardware checks/comparisons during a deployment of a previously commissioned machine, or otherwise auto update stored hardware information during deployment, so that a separate commissioning step is not required after minor hardware replacements.

[khb (khbkhb)]

Mark (our support engineer) was kind enough to add our service issue to this. However, to make our request clear, we do NOT want to recommission. When a drive is "replaced" (BOSS, RAID-1 virtual disk rebuilt) we want any "serial number" or UUID check to simply be skipped. This will become more important moving forward (composable systems, where disks are "attached" just for a single deployment and generally moved to another system upon release. No doubt there exist some group of users who wish to require the absolute same disk each time, but we have no such requirement nor do we ever foresee that as being helpful.

For background see case 00294206 "Disk Serial Number Check Considered Harmful"

[khb (khbkhb)]

I suppose if one were to insist on having the system details updated, the relevant bits of commission (primarily lshw?) could be run as a "test" during deploy, and any gratuitous packages cleaned up by curtin scripts. That's not a requirement from our perspective, but I can appreciate a desire to have the database have correct information about each system even if we don't want it enforced ;>

[Gregory Bupp (hdsyseng)]

Is there any update on this feature request?

[Björn Tillenius (bjornt)]

This is done one in master.

The short version is that you now can download a script and run it on the deployed machine:

  wget http://$maas:5240/MAAS/maas-run-scripts
  chmod 755 maas-run-scripts
  ./maas-run-scripts report-info ...