maas grub issue

[Daniel Bidwell]

I dumped my maas 1.9.4 and installed maas 2.0.

The client servers boot for discovery and commissioning.  When I deploy
one of the machines it installs the system on the correct disk
/dev/sde1, but fails the deploy pretty much like it did with 1.9.4.

The following pastebin contains the maas log, the /var/log/cloud-
init.log and /var/log/cloud-init-output.log. 
 http://pastebin.com/raw/Sy3P8493

When I do a chroot from the ephemeral installer system to the root
system and do a grub-install /dev/sde I get the following error
messages.

 grub-install /dev/sde
Installing for i386-pc platform.
/proc/devices: fopen failed: No such file or directory
device node not found
device node not found
device node not found
/proc/devices: fopen failed: No such file or directory
device node not found
/proc/devices: fopen failed: No such file or directory
device node not found
/proc/devices: fopen failed: No such file or directory
device node not found
grub-install: warning: this GPT partition label contains no BIOS Boot
Partition; embedding won't be possible.
grub-install: warning: Embedding is not possible.  GRUB can only be
installed in this setup by using blocklists.  However, blocklists are
UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged..
grub-install: error: will not proceed with blocklists.

How do I tell maas to create a BIOS boot partition in addition to the
os partition?

On Thu, 2016-10-06 at 14:22 -0400, Andres Rodriguez wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> While I do not know yet what exactly the issue you are facing is, it
> sounds like a problem in hardware configuration. In some situations,
> you need to make sure your machine is correctly configured in MAAS in
> order to be usable. While MAAS does a pretty good job on
> automatically discovering information  and making some initial
> config, there may be corner cases where the hardware itself (BIOS
> config) prevent MAAS from working without doing some configuration.
> 
> In this case, it sounds like the BIOS may be configured to boot of
> from a different disk than the one MAAS is installing the MBR/GTP on.
> If that's the case, you could do one of two things: 
> You can either configure the machine in MAAS, and change the 'Boot'
> flag to the disk that's the actual boot disk in the BIOS.
> Or you can configure your BIOS correctly to make sure the disk that
> maps to /dev/sde is the boot disk.
> I'll ask for some more information on the bug report and we can
> follow the conversation there if so you wish.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/maas/+bug/1631083
> 
> On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 11:18 AM, Daniel Bidwell <drbidwell at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I have a maas-1.9.4 with servers with 4 2T disks for data storage
> > and a
> > 120GB disk on an onboard controller for the system disk.  Maas is
> > deploying ubuntu 16.04 on the servers.  Ubuntu 16.04 labels the
> > 120GB
> > system disk as /dev/sde, not /dev/sda.  In maas I can define the
> > /sdev/sde disk as the system disk.
> > 
> > juju bootstrap deploys the system and installs the OS on /dev/sde1
> > but
> > fails to write the grub record to /dev/sde and leaves the disk
> > unbootable.  The system fails over to booting from an ephemeral
> > iscsi
> > file system where I can examine the state of the machine.
> > 
> > The disk is formated with a GPT partition table which grub will not
> > write to unless I manually create a small partition as partition 1
> > with
> > blocks from 34-2047 and the system partition as partition 2.
> > 
> > This manual step really not acceptable for deploying from juju and
> > maas.
> > 
> > How do I get maas to deploy the system in a way that it will boot
> > without manual editing?
> > --
> > Daniel Bidwell <drbidwell at gmail.com>
> > 
> > 
> > --
> > Maas-devel mailing list
> > Maas-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
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> > 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Andres Rodriguez
> Engineering Manager, MAAS
> Canonical USA, Inc.
-- 
Daniel Bidwell <drbidwell at gmail.com>