Settings backup and restore tool prototype using Ansible -- RFC on a published project

[Paul Fertser]

Hello,

I was thinking about an "ideal" way to allow backing up and restoring
the BMC configuration in production and came up with this set of
goals:

1. The saved config should be easy to inspect and change;

2. It should not require any additional changes on the BMC side, so
   should be usable not only with OpenBMC but also with other
   implementations;

3. The tool usage should be easy to automate;

4. The tool should be easy to integrate into larger management
   systems and it should scale to arbitrary amount of BMCs;

5. It should be as beneficial as possible to the communities using
   Free Software.


To my surprise I couldn't find any existing solution so following
these ideas I prepared a prototype and published at
https://github.com/paulfertser/ansible_redfish_settings .

Please feel free to comment on approach and the implementation, and of
course to provide patches. I have to note I'm not personally herding a
bunch of servers so my notions can be quite off, do not hesitate to
point out when it doesn't match real life usecases.


Point 1 is followed by saving config in YAML format, that's nice to
edit both manually and automatically if needed. Point 2 is fulfilled
by doing only Redfish interactions, optional Oem settings can be added
conditionally. Points 3 and 4 come naturally from using Ansible which
seems to be the most popular system for reproducible mass
configuration (and much more), so should be familiar to most BMC
operators. Point 5 is helped by repository organisation which makes it
natural to submit patches upstream to community.general Ansible
collection.


While working on this prototype I contributed few changes for missing
functionality in community.general collection, the experience was
highly positive as the upstream is welcoming and helpful. So extending
the project to handle the settings you care about shouldn't be
problematic, see my changes for example:

https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.general/commit/e853bdf6f907872fdd39e8c507061269399942e9
https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.general/commit/129f51cf9d284d107cf197a1805481c2e4645efe
https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.general/commit/abe4e5ce95e6cae4a42629640345e0769c3724a1


Here follows the copy of the project README.md with some more details.

# Description #

This project aims at providing an easy to use mechanism for creating a
human-readable and editable BMC settings configuration bundle and for
reliable idempotent application of them to an arbitrary number of
machines. It should be possible to use it directly or to seamlessly
integrate into larger Ansible playbooks as desired. The tasks files
are provided under MIT licence terms.

Added as a submodule is a fork of community.general Ansible
collection. The changes are minimal: extending backwards compatibility
and renaming to not clash with system-wide installation. The idea is
to provide fast, easy and straightforward mechanism to prepare and
test patches for submitting Github pull requests to upstream
repository: https://github.com/ansible-collections/community.general .
After the PRs are merged it's trivial to rebase to get the
latest-and-greatest code. Please note this collection is published
under GPL-3.0.

The testing was performed against OpenBMC hosts but it should be
working reasonably with any other Redfish compliant server.


# System requirements #

Ansible version 2.10.0 (released in 2020) or later.


# Installation instructions #

```
# apt install ansible
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/paulfertser/ansible_redfish_settings
```

If you really need a fully "standalone" solution, consider packaging with
Nuitka as described here: https://github.com/HexmosTech/Ansika .


# Usage examples #

Example command to retrieve all the settings from a single host:
```
$ ansible-playbook get_settings.yaml --extra-vars "baseuri=172.41.1.38 username=root password=0penBmc"
```

The data will be saved to `settings_172.41.1.38.yaml` file.

Example command to set settings for a single host:
```
$ ansible-playbook set_settings.yaml --extra-vars "baseuri=172.41.1.38 username=root password=0penBmc"  --extra-vars @settings_172.41.1.38.yaml
```

The repository includes sample `inventory.ini` which allows to retrieve and set
settings en masse:
```
$ ansible-playbook get_settings.yaml -i inventory.ini
```

-- 
Be free, use free (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) software!
mailto:fercerpav at gmail.com