[Maas-devel] Support for ARM PXE booting, esp. in absence of control over DHCP

[Gavin Panella]

On 20 August 2012 02:40, Julian Edwards <julian.edwards at canonical.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 16 August 2012 14:01:34 Gavin Panella wrote:
>> MAC database
>> ------------
>>
>> We could maintain a database of MAC addresses with their hardware
>> types (and other metadata, if it's interesting), and ship this with
>> MAAS. The dynamic TFTP server would refer to it when rendering the PXE
>> config file. Hardware manufacturers would provide the data for this,
>> but it could be augmented on-site too.
>>
>> This is fairly low-tech and cheap to implement, but would be very
>> effective.
>
> Where would the data come from to populate this database and what format would
> it take?

Primarily it would have to come from manufacturers; they will know the
ranges being shipped in their kit. We can't rely on the OUI part of a
MAC address because it's too coarse grained (though we /could/ use it
as a hint in the UI).

I'm imagining that this database would be shipped in three ways:

- A central database with MAAS, perhaps regularly downloaded.

- Additional databases shipped with hardware enablement packs.

- On-site databases, so sysops can declare the ranges of new kit
  themselves.

The complete database would be the union of the above.

>
> As you say this could be a general fallback solution but I think the ideal
> solution is to push for a real solution in upstream/hardware.  In the
> meantime, we have to make the best of things as we can.

Yeah, that's the most elegant solution. My unscientific hunch is that
cost/benefit will favour the MAC database, but I'm interested to see
what Robie comes back with.