maas-devel team mailing list archive

[Julian Edwards <julian.edwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday 13 August 2012 09:51:09 Jeroen Vermeulen wrote:
> On 2012-08-13 07:49, Julian Edwards wrote:
> > We have a chicken and egg problem of adding new workers if we want to
> > automate it.  Basically, the new worker would need to discover the MAAS
> > server ("Region Controller") and register itself.  To do anything useful,
> > the worker has to have an API key for the server so we don't want any old
> > worker coming along and getting a key and potentially handling
> > compromised nodes.  Additionally, the workers need to be configured with
> > DHCP details.  We can fill most of these in automatically but not
> > everything.  Admins will still need to set up IP ranges, netmask, etc.
> 
> Our design has always assumed that we can send secrets to the worker
> through rabbit.  So I think we mostly need a secure,
> bilaterally-authenticated negotiation for hooking up to rabbit.  That's
> where a manual verification step would seem to fit.
> 
> With that done we can send everything that the worker needs to know down
> over the rabbit channel that we already trust, using a mechanism we
> already have: API service location, API credentials, DHCP settings,
> OMAPI key, etc.

My point was that we don't have DHCP settings until an admin enters them.  The 
act of entering them should be enough to approve a new worker.  Rabbit 
channels are just a comms abstraction and not part of the problem.

There's a lot of appeal to only having one place to set all this stuff up, 
i.e. the MAAS web app.