MAAS not PXE booting

I decided recently to reinstall MAAS since it was no longer communicating with my nodes. Everything went smoothly except the enlistment. Nobody enlists!

I watched one of the servers trying to PXE boot, and it never finds a DHCP server hosting a bootable image. I have verified there are no other DHCP servers on the network.

I used tcpdump to verify that the servers trying to PXE boot are indeed sending BOOTP/DHCP requests that can be seen on the interface hooked up to my MAAS controller, so I believe my network configuration is fine, which seems to isolate this issue to MAAS.

I checked the Services section in the web UI, and dhcpd had no checkmark next to it:

sudo service maas-dhcpd status returns:

● maas-dhcpd.service - MAAS instance of ISC DHCP server for IPv4 Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/maas-dhcpd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled) Active: inactive (dead)
Condition: start condition failed at Wed 2016-11-16 16:21:23 PST; 11min ago ConditionPathExists=/var/lib/maas/dhcpd-interfaces was not met Docs: man:dhcpd(8)

ls /var/lib/maas/ returns:

boot-resources dhcp dhcpd.sock gnupg maas_id maas-proxy.conf secret

There's no dhcpd-interfaces which evidently maas-dhcpd was expecting.

How can I go about fixing this?

1 Answer

This is missing from the documentation, but if you don't have your own DHCP server somewhere else, MAAS does not automatically enable its DHCP server or give an obvious switch for turning it on. It's somewhat buried within the VLANS page. To fix this, in the web UI:

1. Click the Network tab
2. Click the VLAN you want to run your DHCP server on
3. Click "Take Action"
4. Enable DHCP

This is not an option if you go to the subnet page, so it's really easy to miss this.