maas-devel team mailing list archive

[Gavin Panella <gavin.panella@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 20 August 2012 10:10, Stuart Bishop <stuart.bishop@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
...
> Do vendors actually have ranges like this? I would have assumed the
> same chips get used in lots of different hardware types and ranges
> would all get mixed up together depending on what order the assembled
> motherboards come off the assembly line.

I guess it depends on the vendor. They may not be able to provide
ranges, they may just have to provide lists. The assumption would be
that they know what MAC a particular system has when it ships. A
database of millions of MACs instead of ranges isn't inconceivable: a
system name table, plus 6 bytes per MAC, plus a generous 4 bytes
offset into the system name table per MAC, for 10,000,000 systems, is
<100MB uncompressed.

>
> What happens when a machine tries to boot and gets fed an incorrect
> image? Does it try again? If it does, we can just keep feeding it
> different images until one actually works and the machine is able to
> boot and register.

Even if they did, I don't think we can rely on this behaviour. Some
hardware may require, say, an additional kernel parameter to activate
some desirable feature, but can run without too.

>
> Even if MAAS no longer controls the DHCP server, does it still get to
> listen to these broadcast requests? Can we still get the
> vendor-class-identifier from the broadcast request, even if we are not
> the service that responds to it?

I guess we could do that, though it sounds a little fragile. I think
it's worth considering.