maas-devel team mailing list archive

[Gavin Panella <gavin.panella@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Here's a summary of what we discussed on the team call just now. Please
reply with corrections or new thoughts.]

Regarding nodes, MAC addresses, and interfaces, the model we have at
present is:

  Node--<MACAddress--<Interface

This doesn't make a great deal of sense, and is fairly awkward to reason
about and especially to code for.

The model:

  Node--<Interface>--<MACAddress

seems to better model reality.

Simpler yet, we can merge MACAddress and Interface by storing the MAC
address as a field on Interface.

When the DHCP lease parser presents a previously unseen MAC address --
i.e. a DHCP request has originated from that MAC -- MAAS should create a
Device for it, and label its sole Interface as of UNKNOWN type. This
surfaces the new network member to the user in a safe way (a Device is
the most inert of node types) who can later rejig things as necessary.

The MAC address field on Interface should be non-unique.