Plugins » Discovery

Just thinking out loud (scope creep ahead)

1) I assume this would include rules per org and location, so that one org can have different cases to auto-provision
2) It would be nice to have emails/notifications sent out when rules activate
3) I assume full rbac for access to the rules

Bryan Kearney wrote:

Just thinking out loud (scope creep ahead)

1) I assume this would include rules per org and location, so that one org can have different cases to auto-provision

not sure about this one, as initially discovered hosts land in the 'default org of your liking'.

I could see some sort of an approval process (and maybe an org selection) as a useful thing (e.g. before you turn away your db passwords, allow the new system to access).

Thinking loud:

If we implement this scoped_search rule engine, can we leverage it for the purpose of setting up organization and location for newly discovered (and possibly incoming registered) hosts?

I mean, once we have it, we can easily build another set of screens to do this. Or we can incorporate everything into one set of screens. Think of Zimbra filters - they also allows you to drop mails into folders and set various flags.

I think we need to solve Disocvery on multiple subnets first (via allowing a PXE Default template per subnet) - I can't see mutliple Locs/Orgs wanting to share the same subnet. It's far more likely that subnet will be isolated - eg Client1 has discovery on 10.1.2.0/24 but Client2 has discovery on 172.20.10.0/24.

Once we have that, we be a lot more flexible with passing kernel options specific to a subnet into the discovery image, for use when registering the host. We can also be a lot smarter about detecting which subnet the host is on, and using it to guess things like the Loc/Org/Subnet/Domain, etc.

I like the use of scoped search rules for the actual automation though, but watch out for the fact that by default all facts are strings, so rules like "memorysize > 4096" for 4Gb servers won't work without some changes.

For the record, the way we are finalizing auto-provisioning feature is no per org/loc support, except you can set which org/loc all the discovered (thus auto-provisioned) hosts land.

Permissions for rules do not allow per-resource granularity, but it does support RBAC (Discovery Manager can manage rules, Reader can read them).

No e-mails or notifications support in this first cut as well.

But Greg has a working code of per-subnet Default PXELinux template which allows at least some flexibility. First of all, a lock on this template will no longer be necessary. Second, we can easily extend our Discovery Image to accept arbitrary facts via kernel command line, so each organization/location (subnet) can set their own facts to trigger different rules.

This is what we have right now, I am finishing with unit tests this week.