maas-devel team mailing list archive

[Julian Edwards <julian.edwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 21/01/14 14:47, Jeffrey Lane wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 9:20 PM, Julian Edwards
> <julian.edwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I am currently ripping out the notion of a "default" power type as it
>> makes no sense.
>>
>> This raises a question:  if someone tries to start a node that has no
>> power type set, should we:
>>
>>  * Raise an error?
>>  * Set it allocated and wait for the user to turn it on manually?
>>  * Have an explicit manual power type and do both of the above?
>>
>> Cheers.
> 
> Do you mean by starting up a node that was manually added?  Or one
> that was automatically enlisted?

Either, it doesn't matter.

> If a node is manually added, it makes sense to me to require a power
> type be set explicitly.  If it's a node that's automatically enlisted,
> shouldn't that be probe by the enlistment or commissioning tools?  At
> that point, it seems MAAS should be able to determine if it's dealing
> with a SeaMicro, an IPMI supporting BMC or a DMCI supporting BMC, for
> example.

The enlistment tools are not infallible though, and may fail to set a
power type.

> I am, however, interested today in how MAAS handles automated
> enlistment of a machine that only supports Wake-On-Lan.

We don't want to support WoL really, it was originally only a hack to
get simple setups working before we had IPMI working properly.

> Perhaps WOL should be the default in cases where the power type is not
> successfully determined by enlistment or commissioning? (I would guess
> enlistment would be the appropriate place in order to be able to
> automatically turn the system on for commissioning).

So WoL is the default now, but it's not a serious power type. It isn't
able to power down, for instance.

> But take all that with a grain of salt from my limited experience with
> MAAS.  So far, I've only really tried with a traditional IPMI BMC,
> I've not yet tried via WOL or even using virsh on vms as I lack the
> hardware to do either.

Given that MAAS is basically useless unless it can turn power on and off
(or at least boot on demand), a default power type is meaningless as
it's not guaranteed to work unless configured properly.

My original question still stands :)