maas-devel team mailing list archive

[Robert Collins <robert.collins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 10:17 AM, Robbie Williamson
<robbie.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
...


Matt Revell and I interviewed James Troup last night, as a
representative user. We haven't digested everything we got (which was
substantial and useful) but there are a couple of key things relevant
to this thread.

Puppet's CA system wants DNS to work. Doesn't care about the values in
it, but its OOTB mechanism keys off of hostname. So, we have a
necessary condition of DNS being available in the environment.

However, none of the stuff we talked about required or was made
substantially easier via dynamic DNS. Having a delegated forward and
reverse zone to which MAAS config changes automatically prepped
appropriate ec2-style deterministic hostnames would be better than
doing all the DNS themselves. Custom hostnames don't add a lot - the
key thing is not to ever end up copying entire ipv6 addresses around
by hand: thats fragile and terrifying. If/when we get to ipv6, using
e.g. the MAC as the host portion of managed DNS  would be a decent
compromise. MAAS doesn't offer in its vision today to do all DNS
management (e.g. MX, CNAMEs, round robin, HA mapping etc), and so
anyone will also, always, need a separate zone that MAAS doesn't
control. This to me strongly suggests that we can examine splitting
the DNS stuff out entirely without affecting the utility of MAAS, and
making setup and configuration easier. There is, to me, an emerging
sense of several microservices which would scale separately, and be
usable independently.

Lastly and new to this thread, DHCP post provisioning is seen as
actively undesirable due to the addition of another moving part that
can go wrong within the production environment. The current IS
auto-install mechanism freezes the IP details and only use DHCP for
provisioning. We should discuss that separately I think, and not
immediately.

-Rob