Installing MAAS CLI on WSL 2

This is a short post on how to install MAAS CLI on WSL2 so you can administer your MAAS environments for your Windows system.

If anyone reading this is confused as to what MAAS (Metal-as-a-Service) is, it’s an open source cloud platform from Canonical allowing you to manage bare-metal infrastructure, such as networking and server deployments within your DC. https://maas.io/how-it-works

There are a number of blog post going into deeper depth from my colleague Matthew Quickenden here: https://www.cryingcloud.com/blog/tag/%23MAAS

TL;DR

Here's all the command you need to run:

# Setup repo
MAAS_VERSION=3.5
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:maas/${MAAS_VERSION}

# Install OpenSSL Python module
sudo apt install python3-pip
pip install pyOpenSSL

# Install MAAS CLI
sudo apt install maas-cli

Installing MAAS CLI

Following the official documentation for installing the CLI, it tells you to initially run this command:

sudo apt install maas-cli

When you attempt via WSL2 for the first time, you're likely to see the following error:

E: Unable to locate package maas-cli

To get around this you need to run the following:

MAAS_VERSION=3.5
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:maas/${MAAS_VERSION}

Running sudo apt install maas-cli will give you something similar to this:

Dependent on your setup, you may need to run the following to install the OpenSSL Python module

# Install pip if not available
sudo apt install python3-pip

# Install OpenSSl module
 pip install pyOpenSSL

If the module isn't present, you'll get an error like this:

When the pre-reqs are in place running the maas command should return something similar:

Updating Azure CLI on WSL2

I came across an issue on my local system when attempting to update Azure CLI to the latest version so that I could check out the Azure Arc HCIBox Jumpstart (It needs at least version 2.40.0).

I’m running Windows 11, with WSL2 Ubuntu-20.04 and I installed the AZ CLI using the one line install command. At the time, it was version 2.39.0

I tried to use the ‘az upgrade’ command, but it didn’t work.

So I went to the link provided https://aka.ms/doc/InstallAzureCli

There was nothing regarding the issue I had, so I figured I had to remove the cli and re-install.

Here’s the command I ran to remove the CLI

rm -r $HOME/lib/azure-cli
rm $HOME/bin/az
sed -i '/$HOME\/lib\/azure-cli\/az.completion/d' $HOME/.bash_profile
hash -r

I figured I should use apt for the re-install:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install --only-upgrade -y azure-cli

Checking the version shows I now have the latest version:

And it looks like running ‘az upgrade’ should work…

Cool! Now it’s time to check out the HCIBox ;)

Terraform and WSL2 issue

Here’s a quick note on an issue that I encountered today (plus it seems, many other people).

I went to run a Terraform workflow on my system via WSL2, but I cam across a number of problems.

First, was that I couldn’t obtain the State that was stored in an Azure Storage account container. Previously, I used the following config:

backend "azurerm" {
    resource_group_name  = ""
    storage_account_name = ""
    container_name       = "terraform-backend"
    key                  = ""
 }

At runtime, I would specify the values like the example below.

export TF_CLI_ARGS_init="-backend-config=\"storage_account_name=${TERRAFORM_STATE_CONTAINER_NAME}\" -backend-config=\"resource_group_name=${RESOURCE_GROUP_NAME}\" -backend-config=\"access_key=${STG_KEY}\""

However, today, that didn’t work as it just stalled trying to connect to the storage container.

I thought it was something wrong with my credentials, so for troubleshooting purposes, I added the storage account key to see if that made a difference

backend "azurerm" {
    resource_group_name  = ""
    storage_account_name = ""
    container_name       = "terraform-backend"
    key                  = ""
    access_key           = ""
}

I added the primary storage key and lo and behold, this time, it worked.

Strange, as I hadn’t updated the terraform cli or providers.

The next problem I saw was that when I tried to run

terraform plan

it would not complete, seemingly freezing. To troubleshoot this, I ran

export TF_LOG="TRACE"

before running the plan to tell me what was happening in the background.

This in turn produces a verbose output, but something that did catch my was this:

View fullsize

Strange. I know I have internet connectivity and I could certainly connect to Azure using az cli, so I did some Goole-fu and found the following: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8022

It was exactly the same problem I had encountered.

Applying the fix https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5420#issuecomment-646479747 worked for me and persisted beyond a reboot.

(run the code below in your WSL2 instance)

sudo rm /etc/resolv.conf
sudo bash -c 'echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" > /etc/resolv.conf'
sudo bash -c 'echo "[network]" > /etc/wsl.conf'
sudo bash -c 'echo "generateResolvConf = false" >> /etc/wsl.conf'
sudo chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf

It appears to have occurred in the latest Windows update and affects WSL2. It only appears to affect Go / Terraform as far as I can tell.

Hopefully this will help anyone having a similar issue until the Go provider is fixed.