MAAS can deploy custom OS images. Canonical provides both lp:maas-image-builder^ and gh:canonical/packer-maas^ to support creating custom images. MAAS Image Builder requires the purchase of Ubuntu Pro support.
Pro tip: While it may be possible to deploy a certain image with MAAS, the particular use case may not be supported by that image’s vendor due to licensing or technical reasons. Canonical recommends that, whenever possible, you should customise machines using cloud-init user_data or Curtin preseed data, instead of creating a custom image.
Using MAAS version 3.1 and above, custom images can include static Ubuntu images, created with whatever tool you choose, as well as other OS images. For MAAS versions 3.0 and below, MAAS supports deploying custom DD or TGZ images. Customised Ubuntu deployments aren’t well supported for MAAS 3.0 and below.
The MAAS stream^ is generated by lp:maas-images^ as follows:
- It downloads the universal SquashFS rootfs (no kernel) from cloud-images.ubuntu.com and mounts it as an overlay.
- It then installs a kernel and scripts from cloud-initramfs-rooturl and cloud-initramfs-copymods to allow network booting.
- The kernel and initramfs are pulled out of the overlay and everything is unmounted.
- lp:maas-images^ provides the unmodified SquashFS, installed kernel, and generated initramfs as separate files on images.maas.io.
MAAS uses this package to network boot for commissioning, testing, and deployment.
There are two methods for building custom images to be deployed to MAAS machines: MAAS Image Builder, and packer^.
About older MAAS versions
Older versions of MAAS only allow a single TGZ or DD.GZ (no separate files). Custom images are always deployed with the ephemeral operating system, so some debugging may be required. Here is a procedure:
-
Download the rootfs from images.maas.io
wget http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/focal/current/focal-server-cloudimg-amd64-root.tar.xz -
Create a work directory
mkdir /tmp/work -
Extract the rootfs
cd /tmp/work
sudo tar xf ../focal-server-cloudimg-amd64-root.tar.xzor
unsquashfs ../focal-server-cloudimg-amd64-root.squash -
Setup chroot
sudo mount -o bind /proc /tmp/work/proc
sudo mount -o bind /dev /tmp/work/dev
sudo mount -o bind /sys /tmp/work/sys
sudo mv /tmp/work/etc/resolv.conf /tmp/work/etc/resolv.conf.bak
sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf /tmp/work/etc/ -
Chroot in
sudo chroot /tmp/work /bin/bash -
Customise image
apt update
apt dist-upgrade
apt install emacs-nox jq tree
apt autoremove -
Exit chroot and unmount binds
exit
sudo umount /tmp/work/proc
sudo umount /tmp/work/dev
sudo umount /tmp/work/sys
sudo mv /tmp/work/etc/resolv.conf.bak /tmp/work/etc/resolv.conf -
Create TGZ
sudo tar -czf ~/focal-custom.tgz -C /tmp/work . -
Upload it to MAAS
Note: Ubuntu release names and versions are reserved
maas $PROFILE boot-resources create name='custom/focal-custom' title='Ubuntu 20.04 Custom Image' architecture='amd64/generic' filetype='tgz' content@=~/focal-custom.tgz -
Configure and deploy as normal
Verify prerequisites
The following are required to to create a packer MAAS image:
- A machine running Ubuntu 18.04+ or higher with the ability to run KVM virtual machines.
- Various dependencies required by the chosen template (see the template directory for details)
- Packer^
As an example for this article, we will be building a custom Ubuntu image from the default template, which has the following prerequisites:
- qemu-utils
- qemu-system
- ovmf
- cloud-image-utils
Note that these requirements may vary by template and target image.
Verify deploy requirements
The following are required to deploy a packer MAAS image:
Customise images
It is possible to customize the image either during the Ubuntu installation, or afterwards (before packing the final image). The former is done by providing autoinstall config^, editing the user-data-flat and user-data-lvm files. The latter is performed by the install-custom-packages script.
Build by proxy
The Packer template downloads the Ubuntu net installer from the Internet. To tell Packer to use a proxy, set the HTTP_PROXY environment variable to your proxy server. Alternatively, you may redefine iso_url to a local file, set iso_checksum_type to none to disable the checksum, and remove iso_checksum_url.
Build checklist
Packer^ can be used to build images to be deployed by MAAS. In order to use packer, you must have a packer template^ for the OS version you intend to build.
Currently, templates are available for:
- Ubuntu custom images
- CentOS6
- CentOS7
- CentOS8
- RHEL7
- RHEL8
- VMWare ESXi
Note that additional templates will be made available from time to time.
Install packer
Packer is easily installed from its Debian package:
sudo apt install packer
For this example Ubuntu template, the following dependencies should also be installed – but note that these dependencies may vary by template and/or target image:
sudo apt install qemu-utils
sudo apt install qemu-system
sudo apt install ovmf
sudo apt install cloud-image-utils
All of these should install without additional prompts.
Obtain templates
You can obtain the packer templates by cloning the packer-maas github repository^, like this:
git clone https://github.com/canonical/packer-maas.git
Make sure to pay attention to where the repository is cloned. The Packer template in this cloned repository creates a Ubuntu AMD64 image for use with MAAS.
Create images
Packer raw images
To build a packer image, you must change to the template repository directory, then to the subdirectory for the image you want to build. From that subdirectory, you can easily build a raw image with LVM, using the Makefile:
$ make custom-ubuntu-lvm.dd.gz
This makefile will run for a couple of minutes before attempting to boot the image. While waiting for the image to boot, packer will attempt to SSH into the machine repeatedly until it succeeds. You will see terminal messages similar to this one for upwards of three to five minutes:
2022/05/09 15:50:46 packer-builder-qemu plugin: [DEBUG] handshaking with SSH
2022/05/09 15:50:50 packer-builder-qemu plugin: [DEBUG] SSH handshake err: ssh: handshake failed: ssh: unable to authenticate, attempted methods [none password], no supported methods remain
2022/05/09 15:50:50 packer-builder-qemu plugin: [DEBUG] Detected authentication error. Increasing handshake attempts.
Eventually, you should see a successful SSH connection:
2022/05/09 15:50:57 packer-builder-qemu plugin: [INFO] Attempting SSH connection to 127.0.0.1:2351...
2022/05/09 15:50:57 packer-builder-qemu plugin: [DEBUG] reconnecting to TCP connection for SSH
2022/05/09 15:50:57 packer-builder-qemu plugin: [DEBUG] handshaking with SSH
2022/05/09 15:51:17 packer-builder-qemu plugin: [DEBUG] handshake complete!
If the process seems to run for a long time, you can predict whether it’s going to work by doing a series of netstat -a on the IP:port given in the connection attempt. Attempts may fail repeatedly, but if you repeat the netstat -a command frequently, you will see some tentative connections, like this one:
stormrider@neuromancer:~$ netstat -a | grep 2281
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:2281 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 localhost:46142 localhost:2281 TIME_WAIT
tcp 0 0 localhost:46120 localhost:2281 TIME_WAIT
tcp 0 0 localhost:46138 localhost:2281 TIME_WAIT
tcp 0 0 localhost:46134 localhost:2281 TIME_WAIT
tcp 0 0 localhost:46130 localhost:2281 TIME_WAIT
tcp 0 0 localhost:46124 localhost:2281 TIME_WAIT
stormrider@neuromancer:~$ netstat -a | grep 2281
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:2281 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
tcp 0 0 localhost:46142 localhost:2281 TIME_WAIT
tcp 0 0 localhost:46146 localhost:2281 ESTABLISHED
tcp 0 0 localhost:2281 localhost:46146 ESTABLISHED
tcp 0 0 localhost:46138 localhost:2281 TIME_WAIT
tcp 0 0 localhost:46134 localhost:2281 TIME_WAIT
tcp 0 0 localhost:46130 localhost:2281 TIME_WAIT
tcp 0 0 localhost:46124 localhost:2281 TIME_WAIT
This ESTABLISHED connection may not hold the first few times, but eventually, the SSH connection will be made, and the provisioning process will finish. If you want to walk away and come back, be advised that the Makefile clears the terminal buffer at the end, but echoes one final instruction:
rm OVMF_VARS.fd
You can check the validity of the operation with ls, like this:
stormrider@neuromancer:~/mnt/Dropbox/src/git/packer-maas/ubuntu$ ls
custom-ubuntu-lvm.dd.gz packages seeds-lvm.iso user-data-lvm
http packer_cache ubuntu-flat.json
Makefile README.md ubuntu-lvm.json
meta-data scripts user-data-flat
You can also manually run packer. Your current working directory must be in the subdirectory where the packer template is located. In the case of this example, that’s packer-maas/ubuntu. Once in packer-maas/ubuntu, you can generate an image with the following command sequence:
$ sudo PACKER_LOG=1 packer build ubuntu-lvm.json
ubuntu-lvm.json is configured to run Packer in headless mode. Only Packer output will be seen. If you wish to see the installation output connect to the VNC port given in the Packer output, or change the value of headless to false in the JSON file.
This process is non-interactive.
Upload to MAAS
You can upload a packer image with the following command:
$ maas admin boot-resources create \
name='custom/ubuntu-raw' \
title='Ubuntu Custom RAW' \
architecture='amd64/generic' \
filetype='ddgz' \
content@=custom-ubuntu-lvm.dd.gz
Before relying on it in production, you should test your custom image by deploying it to a test (virtual) machine. It’s the machine named open-gannet in this listing:
maas admin machines read | jq -r '(["HOSTNAME","SYSID","POWER","STATUS",
"OWNER", "OS", "DISTRO"] | (., map(length*"-"))),
(.[] | [.hostname, .system_id, .power_state, .status_name, .owner // "-",
.osystem, .distro_series]) | @tsv' | column -t
HOSTNAME SYSID POWER STATUS OWNER OS DISTRO
-------- ----- ----- ------ ----- -- ------
valued-moth e86c7h on Deployed admin ubuntu focal
open-gannet nk7x8y on Deployed admin custom ubuntu-raw
Default username
The default username for packer-created images is ubuntu, the same as the default username for other MAAS images.