#OpenDCRE

#Overview OpenDCRE provides a securable RESTful API for monitoring and control of data center and IT equipment, including reading sensors and server power control - via power line communications (PLC) over a DC bus bar, or via IPMI over LAN. The OpenDCRE API is easy to integrate into third-party monitoring, management and orchestration providers, while providing a simple, curl-able interface for common and custom devops tasks.

Additional documentation may be found on the OpenDCRE wiki.

#Contents

The OpenDCRE project relies on nginx as its web server, with uwsgi as a reverse proxy to a Python Flask endpoint. The OpenDCRE uwsgi and nginx configuration files are opendcre_nginx.conf, opendcre_uwsgi.conf and uwsgi.conf. These files may be edited to suit site-specific needs, change HTTP port, support HTTPS/auth, etc.

The core OpenDCRE Python implementation is distributed as a Python package (opendcre_southbound), and runserver.py, in the OpenDCRE root, is used by uwsgi to launch the Flask implementation.

start_opendcre.sh and start_opendcre_emulator.sh are shell scripts used to start OpenDCRE in hardware (HAT) mode or emulator mode.

To configure the IPMI bridge for OpenDCRE, an example configuration file bmc_config_sample.json is provided, where BMC IP address, username, password and authentication type (NONE, PASSWORD, MD5, MD2) may be chosen. Copy or move bmc_config_sample.json to bmc_config.json and build and run the OpenDCRE container to have the IPMI BMC settings take effect.

Within the OpenDCRE southbound package, init.py contains the main Flask implemementation, which relies on devicebus.py which handles serial communications and command/response framing. version.py contains the OpenDCRE version - if creating a new/changed version of the API, version numbers must be changed in this file only.

Additionally, the devicebus emulator (devicebus_emulator.py) is part of the OpenDCRE southbound package, and simple.json is used to configure the OpenDCRE emulator (see the OpenMistOS web site for API and emulator configuration reference).

bus-test.py is a simple test harness that runs a suite of tests against the endpoint and emulator. The tests subdirectory of the OpenDCRE southbound package stores JSON emulator configuration files linked to the test classes.

#Building OpenDCRE as a Docker Container

To build a custom distribution of OpenDCRE (for example, to include site-specific TLS certificates, or to configure nginx to use site-specific authn/authz), the included Dockerfile can be used to package up the distribution.

In the simplest case, from the opendcre directory:

docker build -t opendcre .

#Running and Testing OpenDCRE

OpenDCRE expects a volume to be exposed for logs (/logs). Additionally, OpenDCRE, by default, uses TCP port 5000 to listen for API requests. In cases where the OpenDCRE HAT is used with the OpenDCRE container, the /dev/ttyAMA0 serial device is also required.

To start OpenDCRE with the HAT device attached:

docker run -d -p 5000:5000 -v /var/log/opendcre:/logs --device /dev/ttyAMA0:/dev/ttyAMA0 opendcre ./start_opendcre.sh

To start OpenDCRE in emulator mode:

docker run -d -p 5000:5000 -v /var/log/opendcre:/logs opendcre ./start_opendcre_emulator.sh

To run the OpenDCRE test suite:

docker run -ti -v /var/log/opendcre:/logs opendcre ./opendcre_southbound/bus-test.py

#License

OpenDCRE is released under GPLv2 - see LICENSE for more information.