yahoo-eng-team team mailing list archive

[Bill Wear <1936972@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Marking as invalid because this sounds like a feature request for MAAS,
not a bug, e.g, MAAS is working as designed.  You can (a) file a feature
request in the "Features" category, or (b) help me understand why this
is should be considered an actual error in the MAAS code.

** Changed in: maas
       Status: New => Invalid

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1936972

Title:
  MAAS deploys fail if host has NIC w/ random MAC

Status in cloud-init:
  Incomplete
Status in curtin:
  New
Status in MAAS:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  The Nvidia DGX A100 server includes a USB Redfish Host Interface NIC.
  This NIC apparently provides no MAC address of it's own, so the driver
  generates a random MAC for it:

  ./drivers/net/usb/cdc_ether.c:

  static int usbnet_cdc_zte_bind(struct usbnet *dev, struct usb_interface *intf)
  {
          int status = usbnet_cdc_bind(dev, intf);

          if (!status && (dev->net->dev_addr[0] & 0x02))
                  eth_hw_addr_random(dev->net);

          return status;
  }

  This causes a problem with MAAS because, during deployment, MAAS sees
  this as a normal NIC and records the MAC. The post-install reboot then
  fails:

  [   43.652573] cloud-init[3761]:     init.apply_network_config(bring_up=not args.local)
  [   43.700516] cloud-init[3761]:   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/cloudinit/stages.py", line 735, in apply_network_config
  [   43.724496] cloud-init[3761]:     self.distro.networking.wait_for_physdevs(netcfg)
  [   43.740509] cloud-init[3761]:   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/cloudinit/distros/networking.py", line 177, in wait_for_physdevs
  [   43.764523] cloud-init[3761]:     raise RuntimeError(msg)
  [   43.780511] cloud-init[3761]: RuntimeError: Not all expected physical devices present: {'fe:b8:63:69:9f:71'}

  I'm not sure what the best answer for MAAS is here, but here's some
  thoughts:

  1) Ignore all Redfish system interfaces. These are a connect between the host and the BMC, so they don't really have a use-case in the MAAS model AFAICT. These devices can be identified using the SMBIOS as described in the Redfish Host Interface Specification, section 8:
    https://www.dmtf.org/sites/default/files/standards/documents/DSP0270_1.3.0.pdf
  Which can be read from within Linux using dmidecode.

  2) Ignore (or specially handle) all NICs with randomly generated MAC
  addresses. While this is the only time I've seen the random MAC with
  production server hardware, it is something I've seen on e.g. ARM
  development boards. Problem is, I don't know how to detect a generated
  MAC. I'd hoped the permanent MAC (ethtool -P) MAC would be NULL, but
  it seems to also be set to the generated MAC :(

  fyi, 2 workarounds for this that seem to work:
   1) Delete the NIC from the MAAS model in the MAAS UI after every commissioning.
   2) Use a tag's kernel_opts field to modprobe.blacklist the driver used for the Redfish NIC.

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