Seek feedback: BMC console and debug info

[Bills, Jason M]

On 8/25/2020 8:35 PM, Ed Tanous wrote:
> 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.
I still need to go dig into it, but I think the new Redfish schemas that 
were added to support the Dump service, added an "AdditionalDataURI" 
property that can provide a URI to download a larger set of additional 
dump data.  It may be what you need for the log file download.

> 
> 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