EDIT: The following issue outlined in this specific reply was ultimately solved/addressed here
Thanks @billwear! We’ve been finding the MAAS Discourse to be a great resource.
One thing that may benefit from your expertise here, if you have a moment: we notice that while the content of this thread does seem to (mostly) remedy the particular situation we (and others) have experienced, we still occasionally get the following:
Unable to locate configuration file.
What works
To be clear: when MAAS has full DHCP enabled on the fabric/vlan, things seem to work just fine. That, in combination with the (unofficial, but hopefully official soon!) patch for duplicate UUID really has made this, generally speaking, a breeze. Only thing we could benefit from would be the re-introduction of Wake-on-LAN support.
What may benefit from your help
It seems that when MAAS does not have DHCP configured (i.e. we followed OP-linked guide/tweaks here), we still encounter the OP issue - but, weirdly, only on the first 2-3 boots of the node. The node will boot, it spins on DHCP (PXE seek), finds MAAS - nice! - then after a few seconds we get “Unable to locate configuration file”
Now here’s where it gets interesting:
- The oft-unmentioned “other prompt” in console, at that moment, is “Press any key to retry or reboot to try again” (rough quote from memory; you get the idea)
- When we leave it alone (letting it trail through those “I’m gonna reboot…” ellipses), or reboot manually - on that second (or third+) reboot, the node picks up PXE from MAAS (just like before), and the config file is found, thus commissioning proceeds
Our network topology is perhaps straight forward (though open to critique/questions):
- MAAS 2.8.1 (snap) running in a NAS-hosted VM
- NAS (and underlying VM) makes use of its own “Virtual Switch” pointed to the NAS’ physical LAN adapter
- NAS itself is physically connected to router
- router running DHCP/DNS (hence OP/our reply)
- nodes physically connected to unmanaged physical switch
- All the above is configured to make to use of subnet
255.255.254.0(thus allowing the NAS-hosted VM, where MAAS is running, to have the statically-assigned IP10.0.1.42)
@billwear - any thoughts on this?
- This really does feel like we may have a simple misconfig in
dnsmasq.conf.add… - or perhaps the “location” of
pxelinux.0is somewhat different these days (i.e. MAAS 2.8.1 makes use of…? and thus must be accounted for by adjusting definition in thednsmasq.conf.addfile)… - or maybe we need to define something else, too in
dnsmasq.conf.add… - or perhaps some other simple thing
Anything come to mind? We’re so close to having MAAS up and humming. So close!