MAAS (Metal as a Service) gives you the ability to provision physical and virtual servers via an easy to use web console. You can use MAAS to deploy Ubuntu with ease, and it even supports PXE boot in order to provide you with a full deployment solution. In this video, you’ll get an overview of MAAS and how to set it up.

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Commands used in this Video

Check to see if tmux is installed.

which tmux

If it’s not, we can install it with:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install tmux

It’s not required to use tmux, but it’s usually a good idea because you won’t lose your progress if your connection to the server disconnects.

Note: I have an entire series about tmux if you want to learn more about it.

If you get dropped from your SSH session, you can easily get back to it by running:

tmux a

That will help you re-establish your session if you lose it. I always recommend performing server maintenance in tmux, because bad things can happen if your session drops in the middle of something important.

Anyway, next, let’s make sure all updates are installed.

sudo apt dist-upgrade

Now that we’ve updated everything, lets reboot the server.

sudo reboot

Now that the server is online, we can go ahead and install MAAS:

sudo apt install maas

That’s literally all there is to it, it’s down to a single command.

Now that MAAS is installed, let’s initialize it:

sudo maas init

We’ll go through each prompt, and answer the questions that come up.

If for some reason you didn’t get asked to create an admin user, or you’d like to repeat that part, you can run:

sudo maas createadmin

You can check the status of MAAS with the following command:

sudo maas status

Now that we have MAAS set up, we can navigate to the IP address for our server in a browser:

http://:5240/MAAS/