Magellan

The magellan CLI tool is a Redfish-based, board management controller (BMC) discovery tool designed to scan networks and is written in Go. The tool collects information from BMC nodes using the provided Redfish RESTful API with gofish and loads the queried data into an SMD instance. The tool strives to be more flexible by implementing multiple methods of discovery to work for a wider range of systems (WIP) and is capable of using independently of other tools or services.

Getting Started

Build and run on bare metal or run and test with Docker using the latest prebuilt image.

Building

The magellan tool can be built to run on bare metal. Install the required Go tools, clone the repo, and then build the binary in the root directory with the following:

git clone https://github.com/OpenCHAMI/magellan 
cd magellan
go mod tidy && go build

And that's it. The last line should find and download all of the required dependencies to build the project. Although other versions of Go may work, the project has been tested to work with versions v1.20 and later on MacOS and Linux.

Docker

The tool can also run using Docker. To build the Docker container, run docker build -t magellan:testing . in the project's directory. This is useful if you to run magellan on a different system through Docker desktop without having to install and build with Go (or if you can't do so for some reason). Prebuilt images are available as well on ghcr. Images can be pulled directly from the repository:

docker pull ghcr.io/openchami/magellan:latest

See the "Running with Docker" section below about running with the Docker container.

Usage

The sections below assume that the BMC nodes have an IP address available to query Redfish. Currently, magellan does not support discovery with MAC addresses although that may change in the future.

Checking for Redfish

Before using the tool, confirm that the identified node has Redfish with curl. Assuming the IP address for the BMC node is 172.16.0.10, we can send a request to see if it we get a response. You might need to pass the -k flag if the node uses TLS or point to the appropriate certificate.

curl -k https://172.16.0.10/redfish/v1 --cacert cacert.pem | jq

This should return a JSON response with general information. The output below has been truncated:

{
  "@odata.context": "/redfish/v1/$metadata#ServiceRoot.ServiceRoot",
  "@odata.etag": "W/\"1715279084\"",
  "@odata.id": "/redfish/v1/",
  "@odata.type": "#ServiceRoot.v1_5_2.ServiceRoot",
  "AccountService": {
    "@odata.id": "/redfish/v1/AccountService"
  },
  "CertificateService": {
    "@odata.id": "/redfish/v1/CertificateService"
  },
  "Chassis": {
    "@odata.id": "/redfish/v1/Chassis"
  },
  ...
}

To see all of the available commands, run magellan with the help subcommand:

./magellan help
Tool for BMC discovery

Usage:
  magellan [flags]
  magellan [command]

Available Commands:
  collect     Query information about BMC
  completion  Generate the autocompletion script for the specified shell
  help        Help about any command
  list        List information from scan
  login       Log in with identity provider for access token
  scan        Scan for BMC nodes on a network
  update      Update BMC node firmware

Flags:
      --access-token string   set the access token
  -c, --config string         set the config file path
      --cache string        set the probe storage path (default "/tmp/magellan/magellan.db")
  -h, --help                  help for magellan
      --threads int           set the number of threads (default -1)
      --timeout int           set the timeout (default 30)
  -v, --verbose               set verbose flag

Use "magellan [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Running the Tool

There are three main commands to use with the tool: scan, list, and collect. To start a network scan for BMC nodes, use the scan command. If the port is not specified, magellan will probe ports 623 and 443 by default:

./magellan scan \
    --subnet 172.16.0.0 \
    --subnet-mask 255.255.255.0 \
    --format json \
    --cache data/assets.db --port 443

This will scan the 172.16.0.0 subnet returning the host and port that return a response and store the results in a local cache with at the data/assets.db path. Additional flags can be set such as --host to add more hosts to scan not included on the subnet, --timeout to set how long to wait for a response from the BMC node, or --concurrency to set the number of requests to make concurrently. Setting the --format=json will format the output in JSON. Try using ./magellan help scan for a complete set of options this subcommand.

To inspect the cache, use the list command. Make sure to point to the same database used before:

./magellan list --cache data/assets.db --format json

This will print a list of node info found and stored from the scan. Like the scan subcommand, the output format can be set using the --format flag.

Finally, set the MAGELLAN_ACCESS_TOKENrun the collect command to query the node from cache and send the info to be stored into SMD:

./magellan collect \
    --cache data/assets.db \
    --timeout 5 \
    --user admin \
    --pass password \
    --host https://example.openchami.cluster \
    --port 27779 \
    --output logs/
    --ca-cert cacert.pem

This uses the info stored in cache to request information about each BMC node if possible. Like with the scan, the time to wait for a response can be set with the --timeout flag as well. This command also requires the --user and --pass flags to be set if access the Redfish service requires basic authentication. Additionally, it may be necessary to set the --host and --port flags for magellan to find the SMD API (not the root API endpoint "/hsm/v2"). The output of the collect can be saved by using the --output

Note: If the cache flag is not set, magellan will use "/tmp/$USER/magellan.db" by default.

Updating Firmware

The magellan tool is capable of updating firmware with using the update subcommand via the Redfish API. This may sometimes necessary if some of the collect output is missing or is not including what is expected. The subcommand expects there to be a running HTTP/HTTPS server running that has an accessbile URL path to the firmware download. Specify the URL with the --firmware-path flag and the firmware type with the --component flag with all the other usual arguments like in the example below:

./magellan update \
  --host 172.16.0.108 \
  --port 443 \
  --user username \ --pass password \
  --firmware-path http://172.16.0.255:8005/firmware/bios/image.RBU \
  --component BIOS

Then, the update status can be viewed by including the --status flag along with the other usual arguments or with the watch command:

./magellan update --status --host 172.16.0.110 --user admin --pass password | jq '.'
# ...or...
watch -n 1 "./magellan update --status --host 172.16.0.110 --user admin --pass password | jq '.'"

Getting an Access Token (WIP)

The magellan tool has a login subcommand that works with the opaal service to obtain a token needed to access the SMD service. If the SMD instance requires authentication, set the MAGELLAN_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable to have magellan include it in the header for HTTP requests to SMD.

# must have a running OPAAL instance
./magellan login --url https://opaal:4444/login

# ...complete login flow to get token
export MAGELLAN_ACCESS_TOKEN=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiIxMjM0NTY3ODkwIiwibmFtZSI6IkpvaG4gRG9lIiwiaWF0IjoxNTE2MjM5MDIyfQ.SflKxwRJSMeKKF2QT4fwpMeJf36POk6yJV_adQssw5c

Alternatively, if you are running the OpenCHAMI quickstart in the deployment recipes, you can run the provided script to generate a token and set the environment variable that way.

quickstart_dir=path/to/deployment/recipes/quickstart
source $quickstart_dir/bash_functions.sh
export MAGELLAN_ACCESS_TOKEN=$(gen_access_token)

Running with Docker

Both the scan and collect commands can be ran via Docker after pulling the image:

docker pull bikeshack/magellan:latest
docker run bikeshack/magellan:latest /magellan.sh --scan "--subnet 172.16.0.0 --port 443 --timeout 3" --collect "--user admin --pass password --host http://vm01 --port 27779"

How It Works

At its core, magellan is designed to do three basic things:

1. Scan for BMC nodes in cluster available on a network
2. Query information about each BMC node through Redfish API
3. Store queried information into a system management database

First, the tool performs a scan to find running services on a network. This is done by sending a raw TCP packet to all specified hosts (either IP or host name) and taking note which services respond. At this point, magellan has no way of knowing whether this is a Redfish service or not, so another HTTP request is made to verify. Once the BMC responds with an OK status code, magellan will store the necessary information in a local cache database to allow collecting more information about the node later. This allows for users to only have to scan their cluster once to find systems that are currently available and scannable.

Next, the tool queries information about the BMC node using gofish API functions, but requires access to BMC node found in the scanning step mentioned above to work. If the node requires basic authentication, a user name and password is required to be supplied as well. Once the BMC information is retrived from each node, the info is aggregated and a HTTP request is made to a SMD instance to be stored. Optionally, the information can be written to disk for inspection and debugging purposes.

In summary, magellan needs at minimum the following configured to work on each node:

1. Available Redfish service with its known host and port
2. A running instance of SMD service with its known host and port
3. Docker to pull and run containers or Go to build binaries

TODO

See the issue list for plans for magellan. Here is a list of other features left to add, fix, or do (and some ideas!):

• Confirm loading different components into SMD
• Add ability to set subnet mask for scanning
• Add ability to scan with other protocols like LLDP
• Add more debugging messages with the -v/--verbose flag
• Separate collect subcommand with making request to endpoint
• Support logging in with opaal to get access token
• Support using CA certificates with HTTP requests to SMD
• Add unit tests for scan, list, and collect commands
• Clean up, remove unused, and tidy code

Copyright

Copyright

© 2023 Triad National Security, LLC. All rights reserved. This program was produced under U.S. Government contract 89233218CNA000001 for Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which is operated by Triad National Security, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration. All rights in the program are reserved by Triad National Security, LLC, and the U.S. Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration. The Government is granted for itself and others acting on its behalf a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable worldwide license in this material to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies to the public, perform publicly and display publicly, and to permit others to do so.