Provisioning without DHCP server

[sprat]

What steps did you take and what happened:

I would like to provision baremetal nodes using iDRAC VirtualMedia without DHCP during the provisioning step. So I am using the preprovisioningNetworkData field as described in the documentation. This documentation states that we have to generate a custom IPA image with the simple-init element in order to support this use-case (or cloud-init maybe, the documentation is not very clear), because the default IPA image does not include an initialization tool. However, I am unable to generate a working IPA image supporting this use-case.

What did you expect to happen:

I would like to be able to provision nodes without DHCP as described in the documentation and be provided some guidance (preferably)... or the documentation should not indicate that a DHCP-less scenario is possible.

Anything else you would like to add:

In fact, I'm wondering if this advanced scenario is/was covered by automated tests. If some one-shot tests were performed, how did you generate the IPA image? Using the ironic python agent builder?

Because in fact, all the things I tried with the ironic python agent builder were broken. I opened an issue in the ironic-python-agent-builder issue tracker, but I got not answer (yet). It seems that glean is broken (used in the simple-init element), and the cloud-init element is explicitly not supported by the ironic-python-agent-builder.

Environment:

• Baremetal Operator version: v0.11.1
• Environment (metal3-dev-env or other): the provisioning tools (BMO, Ironic) are running inside Kubernetes on a VM

/kind bug

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[dtantsur]

I think we need to delegate this to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ironic-python-agent-builder/+bug/2133509 since it's an upstream issue.

[sprat]

I agree for the issue itself... but I suggested to improve the Metal3 documentation to better explain how to create the IPA image because there are many choices available: distribution & release (are there recommendations? minimal or not?), elements (e.g. cloud-init is not supported, dynamic-login is required?), different image building tools outside ironic-python-agent-builder. I must admit that I made different choices and I got many errors during the process, so it's pretty "hard" for newcomers.