Node auto-discovery

The Bare Metal service is capable of automatically enrolling new nodes that somehow (through external means, e.g. Configuring unmanaged in-band inspection) boot into an IPA ramdisk and call back with inspection data. This feature must be enabled explicitly in the configuration:

[DEFAULT]
default_inspect_interface = agent

[auto_discovery]
enabled = True
driver = ipmi

The newly created nodes will appear in the enroll provision state with the driver field set to the value specified in the configuration, as well as a boolean auto_discovered flag in the Plugin data.

After the node is enrolled, it will automatically go through the normal inspection process, which includes, among other things, creating ports. Any errors during this process will be reflected in the node’s last_error field (the node will not be deleted).

Limitations

• Setting BMC credentials is a manual task. The Bare Metal service does not generate new credentials for you even on those machines where it’s possible through ipmitool.

• Node uniqueness is checked using the supplied MAC addresses. In rare cases, it is possible to create duplicate nodes.

• Enabling discovery allows anyone with API access to create nodes with given MAC addresses and store inspection data of arbitrary size for them. This can be used for denial-of-service attacks.

• Setting default_inspect_interface is required for the inspection flow to continue correctly after the node creation.