SOL Logging

[Andrew Geissler]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2018 at 4:03 PM Tanous, Ed <ed.tanous at intel.com> wrote:
>
> I would like to start a discussion around the feature of SOL logging, and how to best implement it.
>
>
>
> There is a proposal here https://gerrit.openbmc-project.xyz/#/c/openbmc/phosphor-webui/+/12063/ that proposes dumping the SOL console text buffer from Javascript into a file, and presenting it to the user as a download.  On its face, it seems to work as designed.  This has some pretty severe limitations, in that you can only dump the console log from your session, and your session is essentially destroyed when you switch pages in the webui, or hit refresh.  I think this is overly limiting, and of the production BMC stacks that I know of, none of them implement SOL logging in this way.
>
>
>
> Instead, other BMCs implement it as a circular buffer inside the BMC itself, which allows SOL to log data all the time, not just while the user is logged in.  I think architecting it this way would be much more useful for admins consuming OpenBMC, and make us more useful as a solution.  Doing it this way also can make the SOL log available to IPMI and Redfish, as well as a file download, which improves the usability quite a bit.  Most places I see the SOL logging requested is for audit type purposes, which the javascript based version can’t do.

We use https://github.com/openbmc/obmc-console for this currently.  It
creates a file at /var/log/obmc-console.log and even has a
customizable size for the file to wrap at. I guess the advantage of
having it in the GUI is the user could ensure a full dump of the
console (vs. just grabbing the existing obmc-console.log which may
have wrapped). Being able to view the SOL output has it happens in the
GUI, then having an option to export it sounds kind of useful.  Also
be nice to be able to retrieve and view the existing obmc-console.log
from the system in case you missed it in the GUI.  Maybe that latter
part is enough though, reduces GUI complexity and testing. Something
good to run by our usability/design team Gunnar/Rebecca?

>
>
> I’m looking for feedback from the community here.  As written, I don’t think the javascript console export is a useful feature given its limitations.  Do others agree?  Am I off base?  Are there use models where having a log of only the current session is useful?  Should we document the limitations so we can respond to bugs in the future?
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
> -Ed