Hi Michael, 2012/1/16 Michael DeHaan <michael.deh...@gmail.com>: > First off, thanks for the interest.
and thanks for your answer. > This is the first I've heard of this app…. Nothing but normal. I wasn't aware of cobbler before looking at provisioning. So, if you've never played with uninterruptible power supplies at least, it's quite logic that you don't know NUT ;-) > The 77 page manual for this app is a bit too long for me at the moment, nor > something I think we can require everyone to read & understand. indeed > For it to > be a clear logical fit, you'll need to be able to make that case to everyone > who is using the power management support today. a first note to disambiguate: - I'm using the term "power management" for the existing fence side. Ie, "on, off, reboot" a device. - I'm using the term "power protection" for the NUT side, Ie everything that concurs to protecting the server, but also to feed power. Refer to this for some more info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerOneiricInfraPower https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerPreciseCloudPowerManagement (still to be completed) Take a closer look at the design section for "Cloud power management" and "Provisioning power protection". And don't pay much attention to the fact that this spec is stored on the Ubuntu wiki: I'm first an upstream, working for any distro/OS! The current pull request has most of the "power management" contribs I've planned. There is the "nut" template, as you've seen, but it requires that I first complete the fence-nut agent, and submit it upstream. The 2nd set of proposed enhancements is related to the inventory data retrieval and "power protection". > I'd like to know more. What are the Elevator pitch and use cases around > this? here are some use cases: - provision and deploy easily power protection across a big set of servers, - be able to use data from the deployed power protection to boost datacenters efficiency * participate to PUE calculation * provide visibility to smartly start servers and deploy load on the right servers. This has direct implication on the infrastructure efficiency. Some more use cases are available in the above spec links. > For new features to be integrated, we need to know how many other > people in Cobbler land are already using this tool, and have supported > hardware. that's a good question, and, as for most if not all Opensource project, we lack visibility. what I can say is that NUT: - is very widely used, - support most if not all UPS under the hood (more than 100 mfrs), lots of PDU (with many patches still stagging) and most if not all IPMI power supplies. So, as a major Opensource project, it's the best candidate to consider basing features on. As an example, the nearest competitor is apcupsd: monolithic, limited to APC only and UPS only. > Then, we need to see the proposed setup steps, command line > changes, and use cases -- to show what we can achieve and how this will > affect existing users if any. this is what I'm currently working on. but as told, I'll need your help to figure out a few things in terms of cobbler integration. > Do you plan a hard requirement on the tool? > What are you planning with regard to the fence scripts, etc? (Keep in > mind, people are using these now…and we can't disrupt them) … What are the > improvements to the handling of fence scripts that you plan? no disruption ahead! I'm doing everything to improve the situation, while keeping intact the past work I also don't plan to hijack fence-agents, but only to add NUT support in it. I don't plan a hard requirement on my side, but still have to figure out how to make a UI "tab" optional. And if it's really needed to make visibility optional... > (All this aside -- though the change to fix sorting is fine, your pull > request has been rejected because it adds a power type of "[nut]" with no > support or script for it) yup, fully right, sorry. I've missed to remove these part while splitting the patches... I'm fixing it, will commit and send again the pull request. Note that I've not squashed the 2 commits into one, so let me know if I should. > Let me know more and hopefully there's a good fit here -- but if not, > perhaps this is something you can configure via --ksmeta and an snippet (or > similar) -- or drive through configuration management integration. as told, I'm still learning cobbler internals... > We want to avoid > Cobbler becoming a "webmin" like tool for all sorts of apps, but there may > be a very strong logical fit here. I need you to help me understand what > this integration would look like, and what it would do. sure thing! > Do other folks on the list have thoughts? I'd be happy to hear feedback too, though power topics tends to not be people #1 focus, despite of the big interest in GreenIT and power saving. So, thanks Owen for the feedback ;-) Does the above give you a better visibility on my aims? cheers, Arnaud -- Linux / Unix Expert R&D - Eaton - http://powerquality.eaton.com Network UPS Tools (NUT) Project Leader - http://www.networkupstools.org/ Debian Developer - http://www.debian.org Free Software Developer - http://arnaud.quette.free.fr/ > On Monday, January 16, 2012 at 6:56 AM, Arnaud Quette wrote: > > Dear Cobbler fellows, > > First, to introduce myself, I'm Arnaud Quette. > I'm mainly in charge of the NUT - Network UPS Tools [1] project. > NUT is the main project for power devices (UPS, PDU, PSU, ... ) management > and protection, and provides the broadest list of supported devices in the > field [2]. > I'm also working on several infrastructure and cloud power management > related topics. > > As such, I've been looking at Cobbler in 2 ways: > 1) improving existing power management (Ie, fence-agents integration) > 2) proposing a design (and latter implementing) for power protection. > > For point (1), I've already made a few fixes, with a stagging pull request > on Github [3]: > - actually make a combo list for "Type", with a sorted list of scripts > (since it's a finite list, depending on the available power templates), > - Reword "Type" tooltip, for more clarity, > - Rename from "Power" to "Power management", to prepare for the upcoming > "Power protection" section (latter RFC), > - Remove "Power" from the various fields (Type, Address, Username, Password, > ID) to avoid redundancy. > > I'm also working on creating a "fence_nut" agent. > Once submitted upstream to Marek (Grac) and Fabio (M. Di Nitto), I'll also > submit the Cobbler template through a pull request... > > For point (2), I'm still working on a design to submit you, but have a few > questions to ask you you before. > > - the general idea is to make it easy to deploy power protection on the > provisioned servers, using the NUT packages, > - this implies some configuration, to point at the protecting and feeding > devices (UPS at least, but also PDU and servers power supply units), > - I'm intending to create a new "Power protection" section, still in the > system page, to allow for setting up these values, > I've made good progress on this part. > - I'm working with inventory systems (OCS Inventory NG and Fusion Inventory) > to discover power devices (through USB, SNMP and IPMI). > The aim is then to be able to retrieve inventory data into cobbler (through > web service interfaces), and provide users with the list of physical servers > and power devices to help filling the various forms . > As a complement, NUT also provides a tool (nut-scanner, which is used by > inventory systems), to discover NUT supported devices. > It is currently available as a command line, but Python and Perl wrapper are > underway. > This can be a fallback, in case inventory systems are not available. > > Now, the questions: > - do you have any input or comment on point (1) and (2)? > - once everything is setup in the UI, how can we enable installation of NUT > packages and push the configuration done by the user? > > I'll get back to you soon with more details on point (2). > > cheers, > Arnaud > -- > [1] http://www.networkupstools.org/ > [2] http://www.networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html > [3] https://github.com/cobbler/cobbler/pull/46 > -- > Linux / Unix Expert R&D - Eaton - http://powerquality.eaton.com > Network UPS Tools (NUT) Project Leader - http://www.networkupstools.org/ > Debian Developer - http://www.debian.org > Free Software Developer - http://arnaud.quette.free.fr/ _______________________________________________ cobbler-devel mailing list cobbler-devel@lists.fedorahosted.org https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler-devel
