Hello all,
For background, I’m having to take over (some) sysadmin duties including a fairly interesting MAAS configuration after a colleague’s departure recently. I’m still trying to learn so I’m banging my head sometimes.
We’ve got a lab environment where the servers we’re using are all using the IPMI power option, which (once you’ve got it configured) works pretty well. However, the servers’ BMCs all get assigned IP addresses by MAAS’s DHCP server (they’re on their own VLAN so they’re separate from the servers’ normal network connections).
It seems to me that MAAS isn’t smart enough to link the IP addresses which have BMCs on them to the ones which are actually going to be doing the PXE booting. Occasionally after power gets turned off (due to ongoing infrastructure changes in the lab), the BMCs get assigned different IP addresses by MAAS’s DHCP, but then the power configuration of that machine isn’t updated dynamically, and it becomes a game of finding the new IP of the BMC, updating the configuration, and then MAAS can function as expected again.
I’ve tried to find a way to configure the DHCP to always assign a specific IP address to a specific MAC (I’ve administered dnsmasq servers before, so I know how to do that), which would sort the issue out for us, but the functionality doesn’t seem to be available from the web UI.
Have I misunderstood something? Is it normal to have MAAS handle DHCP for the BMCs? Is it just a limitation that I’m going to have to live with? If there’s a workaround that will make my life easier it’s great, but if not, I’ll just have to come to terms with it I guess. I just want to try all possible sources of information before I give up and resign myself.
Thanks in advance,
James