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

[Adriana Kobylak]

Some previous discussion on Backup and Restore for reference: https://lore.kernel.org/all/YiEbhAQEdJzf706i@heinlein/T/#m50f639da25e073f973e18b5728c15cc1bf61d168

In summary, the DMTF is open to having a schema proposal submitted, they're just looking for someone from the OpenBMC community to help drive it.


> On Mar 17, 2025, at 4:36 AM, Paul Fertser <fercerpav at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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

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