Build your own private cloud with Ubuntu - I

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I recently tried building my private cloud with my System Administrator Chaitanya. While we both were successful we both were new to it and are still exploring. Since ages I was looking for this concept of private cloud, but then thought, unless i get a feel of it i wont know what it is. We found this page online http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/private-cloud which helped us go with it.

We downloaded 12.04 for we read this in the link :

For extended support,choose Ubuntu Server 12.04.2 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is a long-term support release, and has support guaranteed until April 2017.

while 13.04 was only to be supported for 9 months.

We could write the image on a CD or USB disk, we chose USB disk, used Startup Disk creator for this purpose on an Ubuntu machine. The image was booted on a machine with 250 GB space HDD and a 4 GB RAM which was mentioned in the specification on some link. Anyone who has already installed Ubuntu or any other linux, the installation wont be a big deal for them. Its as usual and regular like any other linux installation. First you see a boot screen with booting options. You need to select MAAS as a server in the boot menu. Next screen should ask you to define a hostname for the system. Next select the keyboard (US). Select the location (India). Next screen asks for the Network Interface, I selected one out of two i had(Realtek). Next was Set up users and Passwords for non adminitrative privileges, then full name, next username, choose a password, reenter password, encrypt ur home directory -> no

timezone kolkatta yes. 

Next you will see the partition screen, Since it was a private cloud installation we were unaware of the kind of partition that we should go for. We chose a manual partition since we wanted to specify the 250 GB space on the machine and not loose other important data on the disk. We selected the free 250 GB space and since we were unaware of the partitions that it would need we chose Automatically partition the free space. We noticed, it automatically created a swap of 4.2 GB and the entire disk on / ext4 file system. Next finish partitioning  and write changes to disk, confirm changes made ->yes.

Now http proxy information on the next page, since we did not have any we left this one blank. Updates -> No automatic updates, Download Language Support -> Yes.

We got a message that maas server configured 10.10.10.125/MAAS. We tried accessing this from a different machine in the network, unfortunately this did not work. Reason being server was still not started. We need to restart the machine for this. Next we need to enter the following command in the terminal 

sudo dpkg-reconfigure maas-region-controller

Install grub loader and then the installation was complete....

Reboot

Once restarted the boot screen looks similar to any other grub loader screen. Its plain text based OS which was expected anyways. After restart when we access the http://10.10.10.125/maas URL we found the maas login screen there.

Maas can be installed with the following link as well.

maas.ubuntu.com/docs/install.html

As mentioned in the above URL we found an error message on top of the login webpage.  "The region controller does not know whether any boot images have been imported yet ... blah blah...

We had no superuser yet created for the page so that was the 1st thing to do on the command line use the following command for the same.

sudo maas createsuperuser

I will prompt you to enter a new username password. Once you are done you can login to the webpage with the credentials you just created.

The import boot images however still remains there, this is because we dont have any boot boot images present with us. MAAS checks for and downloads new images every week however you need to download manually for the 1st time using

sudo maas-import-pxe-files

This takes a long time to complete so you can grab a coffee for yourself :)

PXE : Preboot Execution Environment
Its and environment to boot computers using a network interface independently of data storage devices like HDD or installed operating systems.

More in next part...