actor

What?

Actor abstracts away various management actions to BMCs (Baseboard Management Controllers), and exposes them through a consistent API.

Why?

When managing a large number of Baremetal servers and thier Baseboard Management Controllers, that are from various vendors, multiple generations, we realized the management interfaces (think IPMI, RACADM etc), could use a single API to abstract away all the vendor differences.

Actions like - power on/off/cycle, pxe boot are fundamental to server asset lifecycle management, but these are found to be unreliable, or have no return statuses, or are not exposed by each BMC in a consistent manner, nor do they behave consistently.

How?

Actor runs as a webservice, exposing an API, that abstracst away all of the differences across vendors, into a single API.

Since Actor is based on bmclib, for the list of supported vendors, https://github.com/bmc-toolbox/bmclib/blob/master/README.md

How to run

Install binary

go get github.com/bmc-toolbox/actor

Docker

git clone github.com/bmc-toolbox/actor
cd actor
# build docker image with application
docker-compose build actor
# start server in background, accessable by address http://localhost:8000
docker-compose up -d server

Build yourself

git clone github.com/bmc-toolbox/actor
cd actor
go build
# start server, accessable by address http://localhost:8000
./actor --config actor.sample.yaml server

Check power status

A GET request on any endpoint. It is always a single action and returns the single response.

> curl -s localhost:8080/host/10.193.251.60 
{"action":"ison","status":true,"message":"ok","error":""}

Sequencing actions

Multiple actions can be chained together and sequenced. If any action fails, further actions are skipped.

> curl -s -d '{"action-sequence": ["sleep 1s","ison"]}' localhost:8080/host/10.193.251.60 
[{"action":"sleep 1s","status":true,"message":"ok","error":""},{"action":"ison","status":true,"message":"ok","error":""}]

API return codes and responses

Code	Info	Response
200	All good!	{"action":"sleep 1s","status":true,"message":"ok","error":""}
400	Request is invalid, e.g. the sequence contains unknown action	{"error":"some error"}
417	Failed to execute request.	{"action":"sleep 1s","status":false,"message":"failed","error":"some error"}

Single-action endpoints return one response.
Multi-action endpoints return a list of responses but one response if the request is invalid.

Blade actions through Chassis BMC

This describes the Actor API endpoints to execute power related actions on the blades through the chassis.

Endpoints

/chassis/:host/serial/:serial
/chassis/:host/position/:pos

Blade actions.

Action	POST payload
Check Powered on	{ "action-sequence": ["ison"] }
Power On	{ "action-sequence": ["poweron"]}
Power Off	{ "action-sequence": ["poweroff"]}
Power Cycle	{ "action-sequence": ["powercycle"]}
PXE Once	{ "action-sequence": ["pxeonce"] }
Software re-seat	{ "action-sequence": ["reseat"] }
Reset BMC	{ "action-sequence": ["powercyclebmc"] }

BMC actions

This describes the Actor API endpoints to execute power related actions directly on a given BMC.

Endpoints

/host/:host

Action	POST payload
Check Powered on	{ "action-sequence": ["ison"] }
Power On	{ "action-sequence": ["poweron"]}
Power Off	{ "action-sequence": ["poweroff"]}
Power Cycle	{ "action-sequence": ["powercycle"]}
PXE Once	{ "action-sequence": ["pxeonce"] }
Reset BMC	{ "action-sequence": ["powercyclebmc"] }

/chassis/:host

Action	POST payload
Check Powered on	{ "action-sequence": ["ison"] }
Power On	{ "action-sequence": ["poweron"]}
Power Cycle	{ "action-sequence": ["powercycle"]}

Build

> go get github.com/bmc-toolbox/actor

Build with vendored modules (go 1.11)

> GO111MODULE=on go build -mod vendor -v

Test

> GO111MODULE=on go test -mod vendor ./...

Lint

> golangci-lint run ./...

Notes on working with go mod

To pick a specific bmclib SHA.

> GO111MODULE=on go get github.com/bmc-toolbox/bmclib@2d1bd1cb

To add/update the vendor dir.

> GO111MODULE=on go mod vendor