Hi,
There is a situation which is a bit annoying (even though it’s rare) when a deployed machine is rebooted with a new MAC address for its boot network interface.
For example, you might need to replace a faulty network interface on a physical (or virtual) machine and, in that case, when rebooting, the machine will be seen as “New” and be duplicated since there will still be the remaining “Deployed” machine with the previous MAC address.
This recognition mechanism is not very strong TBH … This is a rare use case but it might happen and this is easily reproducible with a VM managed by MaaS (just change the generated MAC address and make a try).
This might be dangerous since you could end with a machine that is re-deployed with another OS and all your data lost without any warning.
And this leads me to some questions :
- in such situation, what can I do to re-match the new MAC address to the older registered machine ? I suppose this to be quite complicated since metadata url is based on the MAC adress and thus, at least, this should be updated too.
- can’t there be a more robust way to check that a machine is really new and not just slightly modified because we replaced a faulty part ? Wouldn’t it be possible to have some kind of “machine signature” that would help avoid that situation or at least warn the MaaS admin by saying “hey, this machine seem very close to a deployed one, are you sure this is really a new one ?”
Best regards