Bill Wear

34 posts

MAAS Developer Advocate

Stormrider is a tech enthusiast whose passion for computer programming and the UNIX system led to a lifelong exploration of technology. Starting with early experiences in a college computer lab, Stormrider became captivated by the simplicity and power of UNIX, which eventually led to the discovery of org-mode. Embracing org-mode and its versatile capabilities, Stormrider found a perfect match for their organizational and productivity needs. With a love for abstraction and a desire to simplify complex tasks, org-mode became an integral part of their life and work, allowing them to thrive in various endeavors. Today, Stormrider continues to embrace the power of org-mode and shares their journey of leveraging technology and language to optimize efficiency and creativity.

Bill Wear
19 August 2021

About MAAS 3.0 and LXD

MAAS Cloud and server

With the release of MAAS 3.0, we moved LXD virtual machines out of Beta. Several articles in the MAAS documentation address LXD. Since no document ties all these features together, though, it’s time for a topical blog about LXD. About LXD LXD, pronounced “lex-DEE,” is a container manager, as well as a virtual machine manager.

Bill Wear
19 August 2021

Bill Wear
8 July 2021

DHCP Server Conflict Detection

MAAS Cloud and server

This blog title should really be, “Why you always, always, always want conflict detection turned on on all the networks MAAS touches,” but that’s really long as a title. But hear me out. As promised, here is another DHCP blog, this time explaining how you can have multiple DHCP servers on the same subnet, serving

Bill Wear
8 July 2021

DHCP scope

MAAS Cloud and server

It’s possible to have more than one DHCP server on the same network and still have everything work right, with no conflicts and no dropped packets or IP requests. It’s really not that hard to pull together, either, but there are some things to know, and some things to consider before we investigate that situation.

Bill Wear
8 July 2021

Bill Wear
7 July 2021

Moving toward Diátaxis

Server Cloud and server

We discovered the Diátaxis Framework earlier this year. It’s been on our roadmap to shift MAAS doc to this cool new way of explaining things. This cycle, we plan to make it happen. You’d think it would be obvious…. Diátaxis is one of those ideas. Once you see it, you can’t figure out why everybody

Bill Wear
7 July 2021

Bill Wear
6 July 2021

MAAS 3.0 released

MAAS Cloud and server

We are happy to announce the release of MAAS 3.0. This release provides some new features and bug fixes. Here’s the tl;dr summary: PCI and USB devices are now modelled in MAAS PCI and USB device tabs are now available in machine details IBM Z DPM partitions are supported for MAAS and virtual machines Proxmox

Bill Wear
6 July 2021

Bill Wear
17 June 2021

Basic DHCP concepts

MAAS Ubuntu

Let’s step back and take a very basic look at DHCP. In fact, let’s look at the analogy of assigning a street address to your house. Usually, this is done by the local 911 dispatch office, or some other central authority. They typically use either a survey map or a latitude, longitude pair to locate

Bill Wear
17 June 2021

Bill Wear
6 January 2021

Improving CLI output with jq

MAAS Cloud and server

Welcome back to our series on MAAS CLI operations. In our previous post, we learned how to acquire and deploy machines using the MAAS CLI. It was also evident that the JSON output from the allocate and deploy commands was very lengthy for even one machine — so you can imagine how large a list

Bill Wear
6 January 2021

Bill Wear
10 December 2020

MAAS 2.9 is now available

MAAS Ubuntu

Canonical is happy to announce that MAAS 2.9 is now available. We’ll get to the details of installing it in just a moment, but first, let’s walk through a brief overview of the new features and fixes. Later on in this post, we’ll cover some of these features in much more detail. New features &

Bill Wear
10 December 2020

Bill Wear
8 December 2020

MAAS CLI-only machine deployment

MAAS Ubuntu

Continuing in our series on CLI-only MAAS operation, it’s time to deploy machines. In the previous post, we reached the point of creating and commissioning machines, using only the MAAS CLI. Moving forward, there are two key steps: acquiring machines, and then deploying them. Let’s take a look Acquiring a machine using...

Bill Wear
8 December 2020

Bill Wear
2 December 2020

MAAS CLI-only machine creation

MAAS Cloud and server

The whole point of MAAS configuration is to get machines deployed. If you read the previous post in this series, you know how to install MAAS and do basic configuration using only the MAAS Command-Line Interface (CLI). So far, so good, but now we need to enable networking and create some machines. Enabling DHCP The

Bill Wear
2 December 2020

Bill Wear
30 November 2020

CLI-only MAAS operation

MAAS Cloud and server

MAAS provides a state-of-the-art User Interface (UI), which is relatively simple to use, if the required inputs are known and understood. You may be less familiar with the MAAS Command Line Interface (CLI), which is actually more robust, providing additional functionality that’s not accessible via the web UI. In this...

Bill Wear
30 November 2020

Bill Wear
15 April 2020

LXD pod commissioning data

MAAS Cloud and server

MAAS is built to manage machines, including the operating systems on those machines. Enlistment and commissioning are features that make it easier to start managing a machine – as long as that machine has been configured to netboot. Enlistment enables users to simply connect a machine, configure the firmware properly,...

Bill Wear
15 April 2020

Bill Wear
9 April 2020

Questioning the doc

MAAS Cloud and server

Here’s a VLOG about some changes we’re making to the MAAS documentation. It’s all about using questions at the top of articles to help direct attention. This idea grew out of our frustration over long pages with lots of complex information. We tried a top table of contents, but that looks weird and requires a

Bill Wear
9 April 2020

Bill Wear
11 March 2020

MAAS controller communication

MAAS Cloud and server

Much of the functionality of MAAS is contained in controllers. There are two basic types: a region controller and a rack controller. It’s useful to pull back and take a quick look at how these controllers work and interact. This will help you get a better picture of how MAAS operates. Region controller The region

Bill Wear
11 March 2020