Hello! It’s a not-entirely-uncommon scenario whereby one wishes to use MAAS for fleet deployment and management, but are limited by the requirement to boot a system multiple times before it can be deployed. There are some cases where some combination of the following (and other things) might be true in those envs:
- No BMC on machines
- No (easy) physical access to the machines
In those cases, folks are typically pointed to setting up a dedicated PXE server so that autoinstalls can occur on the first network boot of the system. I think that would be a nice feature to have within MAAS, where people could have a machine pull an image from MAAS and install on first boot (with a user-provided default machine config?) and have MAAS do it’s commissioning probing either during that process, or post-boot. Maybe that’s a setting that could be tagged to specific VLAN’s or subnets, so it’s not universal?
It’s understandable that MAAS needs to get a lay of the land before being able to fully (and reliably) manage a system, but I think for sysadmins who are already privy to that lay, it would be nice if MAAS could simply be given a working autoinstall to be used in some circumstances.
Thanks!