Comment 2 for bug 1552378

the lack of usb nic is because the xenial image does not have a "full kernel" inside it . 14.04 maas images had linux-generic installed. So if you were commissioning with hwe-t (ie, you had no need for a newer hwe kernel) then your commissioning would get all the drivers in linux-generic at its disposal.

We can add drivers/net/usb to the boot-intird and we'd have more drivers at the disposal.

Can you try using this attached 'boot-kernel' and 'boot-initrd' ?

To do that, on the maas server:
 kdir=/var/lib/maas/boot-resources/current/ubuntu/amd64/hwe-x/xenial/daily
 for x in boot-initrd boot-kernel; do
    [ -f "$kdir/$x.dist" ] || cp "$kdir/$x" "$kdir/$x.dist"
 done
 tar -C $kdir -xf test-kernel.txz

then restart maas cluster controller and try commission again.

For reference, the diff that produced this in maas-images was just: http://paste.ubuntu.com/15270144/