Create a superuser account

Once MAAS is installed, you’ll need to create an administrator account:

$ sudo maas-region-admin createadmin --username=root --email=MYEMAIL@EXAMPLE.COM

Substitute your own email address for MYEMAIL@EXAMPLE.COM. You may also use a different username for your administrator account, but “root” is a common convention and easy to remember. The command will prompt for a password to assign to the new user.

You can run this command again for any further administrator accounts you may wish to create, but you need at least one.

Log in on the server

Looking at the region controller’s main web page again, you should now see a login screen. Log in using the user name and password which you have just created.

Import the boot images

MAAS will check for and download new Ubuntu images once a week. To avoid having to wait that long, you’ll need to download them manually the first time once you have set up your MAAS region and cluster controllers. Do it again if you add a cluster controller later, so that the new cluster controller also has the images.

There are two ways to start the import: through the web user interface, or through the remote API.

To do it in the web user interface, go to the Clusters tab and click the “Import boot images” button at the bottom of the list of cluster controllers.

A message will appear to let you know that the import has started, and after a while, the warnings about the lack of boot images will disappear.

It may take longer for the exact boot images you need to be downloaded. Give the import time to run; do not click the “Import boot images” button again until the script has had time to download several hundred megabytes from the archive server.

The other way to start the import is through the region-controller API, which you can invoke most conveniently through the command-line interface.

To do this, connect to the MAAS API using the “maas” command-line client. See Logging in for how to get set up with this tool. Then, run the command:

$ maas my-maas-session node-groups import-boot-images

(Substitute a different profile name for ‘my-maas-session’ if you have named yours something else.) This will initiate the download, just as if you had clicked “Import boot images” in the web user interface.

Configure DHCP

If you want MAAS to control DHCP, you can either:

1. Follow the instructions at Cluster Configuration to use the web UI to set up your cluster controller.
2. Use the command line interface maas by first logging in to the API and then following this procedure

If you are manually configuring a DHCP server, you should take a look at Manual DHCP configuration

Configure switches on the network

Some switches use Spanning-Tree Protocol (STP) to negotiate a loop-free path through a root bridge. While scanning, it can make each port wait up to 50 seconds before data is allowed to be sent on the port. This delay in turn can cause problems with some applications/protocols such as PXE, DHCP and DNS, of which MAAS makes extensive use.

To alleviate this problem, you should enable Portfast for Cisco switches or its equivalent on other vendor equipment, which enables the ports to come up almost immediately.

Once everything is set up and running, you are ready to start enlisting nodes