Seek feedback: BMC console and debug info

[Ed Tanous]

Yes, this would be useful to others.  A number of commercial stacks
(including some I helped write) have this feature, and I had hoped
someone would tackle it at some point in the future.

My only comment is I'd rather that we don't duplicate the endpoints in
Redfish, and have both a Console and a ConsoleDownload collection.  If
we need a mechanism to download the full log files, I'd recommend that
the Console endpoint obey an Accept header of "text/plain;
charset=utf-8" and an Accept-Encoding header of "gzip".  That way,
we're still meeting the intent of the HTTP and Redfish specs, even if
we're providing more data download options than they require.

Other than that, yeah, sounds great, lets see the patchset.

-Ed

On Tue, Aug 25, 2020 at 8:24 PM Zhenfei Tai <ztai at google.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> We have worked with our vendor on a system that provides console and debug information, which can be useful in times of debugging BMC issues.
>
> On a high level, we use obmc-console and phosphor-debug-collector to collect data.
>
> obmc-console: We collect console inputs from the host and save to local log files (max 8 files of 1 MB size with rotation.)
> phosphor-debug-collector: We run this process on the BMC with no modification.
>
> For the interface, the data is exposed via bmcweb where there are a pair of URIs for console inputs and debug collector respectively.
> e.g.
>
> /redfish/v1/Systems/system/LogServices/Console -- Enable/disable console inputs data collection.
> /redfish/v1/Systems/system/LogServices/ConsoleDownload -- Download the log files in a zipped file.
>
> It will be great if we can get some feedback on whether the community finds such a system useful and advice to improve the design.
>
> Thanks,
> Zhenfei