Getting help

Where to get help

The two channels you can use to get help debugging a MAAS issue are:

• The Ask Ubuntu website.
• The Freenode #maas IRC channel.

Gathering debugging information

If your question is related to a problem related to a specific MAAS installation, we encourage you to gather debugging information and make it available before you head over to Ask Ubuntu or the IRC channel. This way, you’ll have all the required information handy for people who can help you.

Gathering debugging information is a fully automated process that is performed with the help of sosreport.

If your MAAS server is running Ubuntu version 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) or later, you can get sosreport from the official archives:

# Install sosreport.
sudo apt-get install -y sosreport
# Create the report.
sudo sosreport -o maas

Alternatively, if your MAAS server is running a previous Ubuntu release, you’ll need to install sosreport manually:

# Install git.
sudo apt-get install -y git
# Get the latest version of sosreport.
git clone https://github.com/sosreport/sosreport.git /tmp/sosreport
# Create the report.
sudo /tmp/sosreport/sosreport -o maas

This will create a tarball containing MAAS’ log files, MAAS’ configuration files and a dump of MAAS’ database. By default, the tarball will end up in /tmp but you can change the location, see sosreport’s manpage for details. If there are things you do not wish to share publicly, feel free to edit the tarball.

Now, the last step is to make this file available by any means at your disposal (openly accessible FTP server, Ubuntu One, Dropbox, etc.) in order for the people who will help you to be able to get their hands on it.