[Maas-devel] eth order and node commissioning, and programming advice.

[Kieran Evans]

Hi all,

I've been trying to deploy Openstack via MAAS over the weekend, and I seem
to have stumbled upon an issue.

I've got a pair of Dell Poweredge C1100 which have 2x Intel 1Gb and 2x
Intel 10Gb network cards. The issue seems to be that these cards don't
always get recognised in the same order, and, specifically, Ubuntu seems to
load them in this order:

eth0 -> 1st 10G
eth1 -> 1st 1G
eth2 -> 2nd 10G
eth3 -> 2nd 1G

This is an issue because a) the 10G cards don't support WOL, and are on a
different network to the MAAS controller+dhcp server, b) when the node
reboots to start the "Commissioning" phase, the machine seems to pause for
a long time at a message about waiting for eth0 to become ready (I've not
got access to the machine for a few hours and didn't make a note of the
exact message). I assume (maybe foolishly) that it's waiting for a network
on the first 10G card, which it wont find. Sometimes, it'll go through
properly, but usually after a Ctrl+alt+del or two to reboot and restart the
process.

I'm not sure how the process currently works, but I was thinking it could
be possible to pass a file in via the PXE boot process that tells it what
interface to look for a network on, via looking for a MAC address. Am I
missing something, or is this something that could be done?


My second question is regarding IPMI. The current options for starting
machines are virsh and WOL. I've had better results in my setup using IPMI
to start machines, and I was wondering if this was something people might
want in MAAS. Further IPMI support could include the ability to remotely
enable pxe booting (i.e. `ipmitool -I lan -U username -P password -H
ipaddress chassis bootdev pxe`) and other things.

I was wondering where would be a good place to start in my delve into the
code to get to know it, and where I'd look at adding support to start
machines via IPMI.

Thanks all,

/Kieran
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