MaaS nodes being enlisted with multiple network cards fail to commission

[Eric Frost]

Allowing MaaS to do it's own DHCP/DNS but isolating it onto its own network segment and having nodes with two network interfaces (one interface connected to the network segment the Maas controllers are on and the second interface connected to another (different) network segment that has external internet access) results in failure to commission nodes properly.

The nodes correctly start up, contact the server, boot and sit...eventually printing various apt-get error messages about being unable to connect to external sites before ultimately powering off and changing the state on the Nodes page from commissioning to ready. It seems that only one interface is being brought up (the one that contacted the MaaS controller) and the other one is ignored.

This was tested on a fresh 12.04.2 server install and using the MaaS stable PPA package version 1.2+bzr1373+dfsg-0ubuntu1~12.04.1~ppa1.

[Andres Rodriguez (andreserl)]

The only section where I see this would affect would be ipmi autodetection. Do the nodes in Ready state have CPU/Memory values?

Now, MAAS requires Internet access (or archive access in such case) in order to be able to obtain packages and be able to install the packages it needs. I'm assuming that this is the same case for the Debian Installer.

Unfortunately, this is not really a bug in MAAS itself. During the commissioning process, it is cloud-init the one in charge of configuring network interfaces. Cloud-init only waits (and configures) DHCP on BOOTIF (being this the network interface where it is PXE booting from), and does not configure any other network interface. This means that if your MAAS network does not have external network access, then the commissioning environment wont be able to install packages because the network it PXE Booted from will be the only configured network interface.

[Julian Edwards (julian-edwards)]

Andres, in that case does this need a MAAS bug task?

[Daniel Jones (daniel-jones-emt)]

I have ran into issues regarding this. To give some background a large majority of my server NICs are connected to VLAN specific ports on my switches. If MAAS chooses to use a NIC that is configured to use a different VLAN than the MAAS controller there will be no traffic obviously. You should be able to choose which NIC you want to be used as a primary and even specify static IP information if desired after a node has enlisted. Even if this "static" IP is just a static assignment via DHCP.