maas-devel team mailing list archive

[Robbie Williamson <robbie.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 07/23/2012 05:41 PM, Robert Collins wrote:
> 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.
Yeah, I suspected that the DNS needs would come from users not wanting
to do Juju, just basic install and config management/inventory.

> 
> 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.
+1 All I know is that fighting with DNS was the main blocker to getting
my demo up and running (besides setting up a local mirror), and unlike
having the local mirror, once it was working, I never used it nor had a
need to.

> 
> 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. 
+1 Seems easy to solve...like a check box per machine on MAAS, "i.e.
DHCP at first boot only".

> We should discuss that separately I think, and not immediately.
+10 :)

> 
> -Rob
> 


-- 
Robbie Williamson <robbie.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Director of Engineering, Ubuntu Server
Canonical

"You can't be lucky all the time, but you can be smart everyday"
 -Mos Def