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/
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