maas commission repository mirror

[moose]

during the commissioning of a node when the install image is used for pxe boot it uses archive.ubuntu .com for the mirror. this is fine if your network is on the internet. in an offline setup I have the repo mirrored. when the installer does not find archive.ubuntu.com it prompts for the ip of the mirror. it fails to find the mirror. however watching the access logs for apache on which I had the mirror setup, it never tries to access it.

the workaround was I setup dnsmasq to point archive.ubuntu.com to my local server. all worked as expected.

a possible better solution is to have maas use apt-cacher-ng by default to act as a the mirror. that way as more nodes are commissioned the packages will not have to be downloaded again. this also solves my problem since the default mirror for commissioning could be ip address of the maas master node, if that is what one would call it.

Apt-cacher-ng also also has the ability to do complete mirrors of the repos.

[James Page (james-page)]

Hi Moose

I raised this in #maas on Freenode IRC:

{{{
<jamespage> allenap, does maas support using alternative archive mirrors yet?
 say for folk who have a local mirror and no direct external access for servers being managed by maas...
<allenap> jamespage: Nope, I don't think so. rvba, do you know different?
<jamespage> it uses squid-deb-proxy for localize caching right?
 actually this might be related to commissioning only
 bug 1032183
<ubot5> Launchpad bug 1032183 in maas (Ubuntu) "maas commission repository mirror" [Undecided,New] https://launchpad.net/bugs/1032183
<allenap> jamespage: Right, squid-deb-proxy is used. I didn't know off hand because it's configured by the package. Our goal for 12.10 is to provide caching by default and optional mirroring of everything that exists outside of a user's data centre.
<jamespage> allenap, ta - thanks for the information - I'll update the bug report
}}}

Looks like this will land for 12.10 if all goes to plan. squid-deb-proxy is a more scalable alternative to apt-cacher-ng and is already used in maas.

Marking 'Wishlist' (as its a feature request) and 'Triaged' as no further action is required at this point in time.

Thanks

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

I've dropped the task from quantal.
This can mostly be accomplished running through a proxy. full offline mirror probably doesn't work completely yet though.

bug 1066020 mentions vaguely how you can get the enlistment environment to use your proxy, and commissioning can also be accomplished.