[Maas-devel] RFC: "Serialising" power actions

[Gavin Panella]

On 17 September 2014 08:47, Julian Edwards <julian.edwards at canonical.com> wrote:
...
> I believe flagging to be wrong, MAAS should be taking corrective
> action. If someone wants to turn off a machine, do it through MAAS,
> not elsewhere.

When that machine has been provisioned by an IS department for someone
else's use? "If you wish to reboot, power-off, or power-on the machine
on which you have root, please file a ticket and we'll deal with it
under our usual SLA." That's uncool.

Saying that MAAS is now the power fascist for deployed machines is a
change of direction. I think it's fine if people want to use MAAS to
control their node's power, but we should not force them.

>
> For example, the power could have failed, and the BIOS might not be
> set to restart the machine upon power restoration. MAAS could be
> useful and power up the node if it knows it should be on.

The BIOS might also have been set to keep the machine off after a power
failure. We /could/ add flags and suchlike to MAAS to tweak all of this,
but much simpler is to step back and let the users have the final say on
what are now _their_ machines.

Looked at another way: if MAAS was forcing power control on my machine
I'd remove MAAS's credentials from the BMC.

>
> Just because a node is deployed does not mean we can abdicate
> responsibility for this.

We are deliberately handing over responsibility for the machine to the
user, to a similar degree that a system administrator would if they were
to give root on a box.