MAAS Troubleshooting¶
Some parts of MAAS may still be a little confusing, and sometimes you might be trying to do things that are just plain impossible. This section covers some of the most commonly encountered problems and tries its best to make them gone.
Contents
Nodes hang on “Commissioning”¶
Possible Cause: Timing issues¶
Various parts of MAAS rely on OAuth to negotiate a connection to nodes. If the current time reported by the hardware clock on your node differs significantly from that on the MAAS server, the connection will not be made.
SOLUTION: Check that the hardware clocks are consistent, and if necessary, adjust them. This can usually be done from within the system BIOS, without needing to install an OS
Possible Cause: Network drivers¶
Sometimes the hardware can boot from PXE, but fail to load correct drivers when booting the received image. This is sometimes the case when no open source drivers are available for the network hardware.
SOLUTION: The best fix for this problem is to install a Linux-friendly network adaptor. It is theoretically possible to modify the boot image to include proprietary drivers, but it is not a straightforward task.
Nodes fail to PXE boot¶
Possible Cause: Using an incorrectly configured VM¶
Some Virtual Machine setups include emulation of network hardware that does not support PXE booting, and in most setups, you will need to explicitly set up the VM to boot via PXE.
SOLUTION: Consult the VM docs for details of PXE booting.
Possible Cause: DHCP conflict¶
If you are using MAAS in a setup with an existing DHCP, DO NOT SET UP THE MAAS DHCP SERVER as this will cause no end of confusion to the rest of your network and most likely won’t discover any nodes either.
SOLUTION: You will need to either:
- Configure your existing DHCP server to point to the MAAS server.
or
- Enlist nodes using avahi, which is the preferred option. For a quick guide to this, please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam/MAAS/AvahiBoot
Can’t log in to node¶
Sometimes you may wish to login directly to a node on your system. If you have set up Juju and MAAS, the attached nodes will automatically receive existing ssh keys and sets up ssh on the node to authenticate via key, so you can just login with no password from the server. There is also an option in the MAAS web interface to add new ssh keys to the nodes (via Preferences in the drop down menu which appears when clicking your username in the top-right of the page).
Forgot MAAS superuser password¶
As long as you have sudo privileges, this is not a disaster. You can use the maas command to change the password for the MAAS superuser on the MAAS server:
sudo maas changepassword maas-root
Need to reconfigure server IP address¶
If you made a mistake during setup or you just need to reconfigure your MAAS server, you can simply run the setup again:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure maas
Can’t find MAAS webpage¶
The default webpage is located at http://<hostname>/maas. If you can’t access it, there are a few things to try:
- Check that the webserver is running - By default the web interface uses Apache, which runs under the service name apache2. To check it, on the MAAS server box you can run sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 status.
- Check that the hostname is correct - It may seem obvious, but check that the hostname is being resolved properly. Try running a browser (even a text mode one like lynx) on the same box as the MAAS server and navigating to the page. If that doesn’t work, try http://127.0.0.1/maas, which will always point at the local server.
- If you are still getting “404 - Page not found” errors, check that the MAAS web interface has been installed in the right place. There should be a file present called /usr/share/maas/maas/urls.py
