Mirroring images is worthy of consideration. The SimpleStreams protocol delivers Images to MAAS, which is especially useful when your Internet link is slow or unreliable. In this mirrored configuration, images will be instantly available when MAAS requests them.
Quick questions you may have:
- How do I set up a local mirror?
- How do I configure MAAS to use the local mirror?
- How do I use a local mirror through the CLI?
Setting up a local mirror
To use mirroring, you begin by installing the necessary software on the host that will house the mirror:
sudo apt install simplestreams
First define some variables to unclutter eventual CLI commands:
KEYRING_FILE=/usr/share/keyrings/ubuntu-cloudimage-keyring.gpg
IMAGE_SRC=https://images.maas.io/ephemeral-v3/stable
IMAGE_DIR=/var/www/html/maas/images/ephemeral-v3/stable
The below example selects all available kernels that are compatible with either Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) and Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal) for the amd64 architecture, resulting in a download of approximately 3.1 GB. The second command mirrors the bootloaders.
sudo sstream-mirror --keyring=$KEYRING_FILE $IMAGE_SRC $IMAGE_DIR \
'arch=amd64' 'release~(bionic|focal)' --max=1 --progress
sudo sstream-mirror --keyring=$KEYRING_FILE $IMAGE_SRC $IMAGE_DIR \
'os~(grub*|pxelinux)' --max=1 --progress
To know in advance what the sstream-mirror
command will grab, or if you want to save bandwidth and time by avoiding bad selections, include the --dry-run
option. When you are satisfied, remove that option to initiate the download.
MAAS will write the images to disk in the directory defined by the variable ‘IMAGE_DIR’ above, and the ‘location’ of the new boot source will be:
URL=http://<myserver>/maas/images/ephemeral-v3/stable/
Where <myserver>
identifies your server’s hostname or IP address.
Verify the availability of the images by visiting the above URL.
The final sstream-mirror
command should be invoked at regular intervals (i.e. with cron
) to ensure the mirror contains the latest images.
Configure MAAS to use a local mirror with the CLI
See Add a boot source and Using a local image mirror for instructions on how to do this with the CLI.