Like Arif said, the most mindless, cross-vendor approach that should generally 
work is to pxe boot the node and leave it to 'bmcsetup' to handle the IPMI 
configuration.  For switches, depending on your vendor strategy, there's a few 
things, some proprietary, some standard, but depends heavily upon the 'default' 
behavior of your switch vendors as to whether it's actually viable.

Now for going a bit off the beaten path for potentially useful stuff:
Incidentally for non-node things via DHCP without knowing the macs, strictly 
speaking that will happen naturally with a dynamic range (we usually describe 
that as being relevant to 'discovery', but the dhcp range will answer things 
like switches, service processors, and laptops plugged in for a bit).  
Depending on the DHCP request and if makedns is right, then their requested 
hostname will be put into DNS.  However, failing that harvesting pertinent 
details from /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd.leases may be interesting.  I have done this 
upon occasion, but I don't feel like it ever shows promise as a robust method 
to base an automation strategy around.

Note that the automatic discovery I plan to take to new levels in confluent.  
At least for Lenovo equipment, I'm comfortable that we can get to the point 
where DHCP or no DHCP, we can automate the configuration of systems as long as 
we are on the same vlan as them.    I'll of course be doing my best to follow 
strategies that make most use out of standards, but like above some of these 
standards are not ubiquitous or on by default.  I hope to bake this design more 
in the coming months to get a more concrete wish list for things that would be 
good defaults to request of vendors.


From: Arif Ali [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, November 09, 2015 4:19 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [xcat-user] xCAT 2.10 non-node DHCP assigenment and more questions

Hi Mark,

Good to see you on-board

All the latest docs are located on the new documentation site readthedocs [1], 
but you may want to start on sourceforge [2], but note that a lot of the 
ducmentation currently is being migrated from sourceforge to readthedocs.

To answer your questions, see below on my take on it, others may have more and 
different answers


That said I am looking for information on how to do the following thing. I have 
extensively Googled and haven't found answers for these as of yet, even links 
would be greatly appreciated!

Deploy diskless nodes over IB
- I saw this as a priority three on the 2.10 roadmap but haven't see much of 
anything about it. If anyone has this working I don't mind doing the legwork. I 
have managed to get somewhere on this but end up with an error: "dracut 
warning: No root device "1" found" and haven't managed to get past that. This 
is the most important piece to be honest.
I have also seen this in the roadmap as well, but actually seen it in action, I 
can't see it in the release notes [3], maybe something I am missing. I would 
love to be able to do this myself


Configure non-node entities via DHCP
- A good for instance would be setting up IPMI or switches via DHCP without 
knowing the mac. We have quite a bit of volume and automatic setup of these 
items would greatly speed up our process.

On this note, the key word is discovery for search criteria in the readthedocs. 
Depending on the HW you have, and the switches you have, you can discover in ~3 
methods

1. Automagic through switch discovery, This is detailed in [4], [5] and [6]
2. Sequential Discovery -- resources include [7], [8] and [9]
3. Flex or bladecenter node discovery -- resource include [10]

Hopefully, this will give you a lot of reading material to go through the 
paces. I know the documentation is in quite a few places, but that is due to 
things getting migrated to readthedocs.

If you have any issues, give us a shout on IRC, some of us hang out on the 
#xcat channel

[1] http://xcat-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
[2] http://sourceforge.net/p/xcat/wiki/Main_Page/
[3] https://github.com/xcat2/xcat-core/wiki/XCAT_2.10_Release_Notes
[4] 
http://sourceforge.net/p/xcat/wiki/XCAT_NeXtScale_Clusters/#node-definition-and-discovery
[5] 
http://sourceforge.net/p/xcat/wiki/XCAT_iDataPlex_Cluster_Quick_Start/#option-2-switch-discovery
[6] 
http://xcat-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/guides/admin-guides/manage_clusters/ppc64le/discovery/switch_discovery.html
[7] http://sourceforge.net/p/xcat/wiki/Sequential_Discovery/
[8] 
http://sourceforge.net/p/xcat/wiki/XCAT_iDataPlex_Cluster_Quick_Start/#option-1-sequential-discovery
[9] 
http://xcat-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/guides/admin-guides/manage_clusters/ppc64le/discovery/seq_discovery.html
[10] 
http://sourceforge.net/p/xcat/wiki/XCAT_system_x_support_for_IBM_Flex/#cmm-discovery-and-configuration

regards,
Arif
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