Design: Setting a unique hostname to the BMC machine on first boot

[Alexander A. Filippov]

On Tue, May 21, 2019 at 01:05:36PM +0530, Asmitha Karunanithi wrote:
> Hi Team,
> 
> I have been facing a problem and the details of which is mentioned below.
> 
> Problem Description:
> In OpenBMC, the hostname discovery is done by the avahi Dbus service at the
> startup. In a network where there are multiple OpenBMC machines, avahi keeps
> getting the hostname conflict and the service name conflict. Hence, the
> problem is to find a solution that resolves these conflicts.
> 
> Background and References:
> The detailed issue regarding the hostname and service name conflicts is
> described in the following links.
> https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc/issues/1741.
> https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/avahi/2018-January/002492.html
> https://github.com/lathiat/avahi/issues/117
> 
> Requirements:
> None.
> 
> Proposed Design:
> To solve this, we are proposing a service which assigns a unique hostname to
> the BMC and runs on the very first boot. one of the ways to generate the
> unique
> hostname is to append the machine UUID to the existing default hostname.

We have already done it for our hardware, but we used the BMC's Serial Number
instead of UUID.

This service is very similar to meta-opepower/recipes-phosphor/network/first-boot-set-mac

How it works:
- openpower-vpd-parser read content of EEPROM VPD and fill corresponded fields
  in the inventory.
- the service reads serial number via DBus  and append it to the hostname if
  it has default value.

> 
> Alternatives Considered:
> None.
> 
> Impacts:
> None.
> 
> Testing:
> None.
> 
> If you have any suggestions, please feel free to let me know.
> -- 
> Thanks & Regards,
> Asmitha Karunanithi

--
Regards,
Alexander Filippov
Software Engineer, YADRO