maas-devel team mailing list archive

[Julian Edwards <julian.edwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday 30 Apr 2012 17:39:06 Kieran Evans wrote:
> My second question is regarding IPMI. The current options for starting
> machines are virsh and WOL. I've had better results in my setup using IPMI
> to start machines, and I was wondering if this was something people might
> want in MAAS. Further IPMI support could include the ability to remotely
> enable pxe booting (i.e. `ipmitool -I lan -U username -P password -H
> ipaddress chassis bootdev pxe`) and other things.
> 
> I was wondering where would be a good place to start in my delve into the
> code to get to know it, and where I'd look at adding support to start
> machines via IPMI.

Hi, thanks for your interest in doing some coding.  We plan on adding more 
power types in the near future so you could wait a while, but if you're really 
keen we can certainly help you along!

It should be quite easy to add IPMI support although there's a few things to 
consider:
 * We need to make a database schema change store a node's power type 
parameter.  Power type itself is already there, but it a) relies on data 
loaded separately into cobbler to work if you're not using WoL, b) only 
enumerates virsh in addition to WoL right now
 * We need a UI change to let the user add the parameters
 * A change in the pserv daemon to poke the new data into cobbler
 * Tests!  We always write unit tests.

Finally, we will be ripping out cobbler in the next few months (could be 
sooner depending on the outcome of some planning) so while this change doesn't 
touch too much of cobbler, we have to bear it in mind.

If you are still keen then I can arrange for a mentor to help you through the 
process!

J