Part of a series: Install · Configure · DHCP · Commission · Deploy · jq · SSH · More jq

In order to deploy machines, I’ve got to create some and commission them. Normally I’d do that with the UI, but for this exercise I’m attempting it entirely with the CLI.

Creating a machine

stormrider@wintermute:~$ maas admin machines create \
  architecture=amd64 \
  mac_addresses=52:54:00:15:36:f2 \
  power_type=virsh \
  power_parameters_power_id=f677a842-571c-4e65-adc9-11e2cf92d363 \
  power_parameters_power_address=qemu+ssh://stormrider@192.168.123.1/system \
  power_parameters_power_pass=xxxxxxxx

Success. The machine starts commissioning immediately, just as if I’d created it from the UI. The JSON output is lengthy — the key fields to note are:

• "status_message": "Commissioning" — it’s already running
• "system_id": "bhxws3" — you’ll need this for subsequent commands
• "hostname": "ace-swan" — MAAS auto-assigns a two-word hostname
• "architecture": "amd64/generic" — confirmed

A lot of parameters are a little hard to discover. They may be somewhere in the documentation, or buried in one of the read outputs. I used --help and a couple of other commands to discover the power_pass parameter, for example, though I later found it elsewhere in the docs. Doc is always a work in progress, I guess.

Retrieving the system ID

So now I have a machine in the “Ready” state, but I’d like to get familiar with commissioning via the CLI. All I really need is the system ID — which is the last element in the resource_uri from the JSON above. But just for practice, let’s retrieve it using the CLI:

stormrider@wintermute:~$ maas admin machines read | \
  jq '.[] | .hostname, .system_id'
"ace-swan"
"bhxws3"

Commissioning via the CLI

Now use that system ID to commission the machine:

stormrider@wintermute:~$ maas admin machine commission bhxws3

Success. The JSON output confirms:

• "status_message": "Commissioning" — running
• "commissioning_status_name": "Pending" — tests queued
• "bios_boot_method": "pxe" — PXE boot confirmed
• "power_state": "off" — machine is being powered on by MAAS

The commissioning process discovers and records hardware: CPU count, memory, block devices, network interfaces, NUMA nodes. By the time it finishes, MAAS will know exactly what it’s working with.

And that’s it — that easy. It takes a minute to gather all the parameters for machine creation, but commissioning itself is a single command once you have the system ID.

Next up: acquiring and deploying the machine.