Releasing a machine which was commissioned using the MAAS 3.1 beta 3 "enlist deployed machines" feature deletes the machine's network devices.

[Ben Huntley]

After enlisting/commissioning an already deployed machine following the instructions from section "How to update hardware information for a deployed machine" in the MaaS 3.1 beta 3 documentation (https://maas.io/docs/snap/3.1/ui/whats-new-in-maas), if the machine is then Released using the MaaS Web UI, the network devices associated with the commissioned machine disappear.

MaaS region server is running MAAS 3.1.0~beta3 on Ubuntu 20.04, installed from Deb. Rack controller is also running MAAS 3.1.0~beta3 on Ubuntu 20.04. Host being enlisted/comissioned is running Ubuntu 18.04.6.

No relevant logging was observed for this issue.

[Alberto Donato (ack)]

This is a known limitation.

Currently MAAS has no way of reliably tell which ones are physical interfaces and which are not, and leaving non-physical interfaces configured would likely cause a deployment to fail.

For this reason, after releasing a machine created as already deployed, the user needs to commission it before it can be deployed from MAAS.

[Ben Huntley (benhunt)]

Thanks a ton for your reply Alberto!

Would it make sense to look at /sys/class/net for this information? `ls -la /sys/class/net/` should show devices as pci or virtual in it's symlink information. Alternatively, allowing the user to specify the network devices they wish to commission, similar to the configuration proposed in https://bugs.launchpad.net/maas/+bug/1947901, would be a fine solution for our use-cases.

Any solution that does not automatically delete the network interfaces would seem to be superior, as that seems to defeat the purpose of allowing commission of deployed machines?

[Alberto Donato (ack)]

Thanks for the suggestions, we definitely want to improve detection in the future.

Unfortunately, currently the only way to ensure MAAS has the proper info is to commission the machine.

Note that the current feature is not so much "commisioning deployed machines" as allowing to track existing machines in MAAS, so that MAAS offers a more complete picture of the existing resources (hardware, IPs, ...).

[Jerzy Husakowski (jhusakowski)]

Feature request moved to internal backlog for further prioritisation (internal ref. PF-4209)