Auto-discovery of bare metal nodes is a peculiar thing: everyone wants it in
theory, but very few end up using it after facing the harsh reality. The truth
is, there is not so much information you can discover by powering a machine on
and booting a special ramdisk on it. I mean, oh, sure, we can collect literally
thousands of various facts and runtime characteristics, but a few critical ones
keep evading us. Specifically, BMC credentials. The very few facts ironic needs
to be able to manage the machine. Oops.
In all fairness to hardware vendors, it's not very sensible to allow any user,
even one with root access, to learn these critical bits of a hardware
infrastructure. Not in the cloud era.
Two ideas appeared from numerous heated (and not so much) discussions, one
great and one abysmal:
Today we're talking about the latter.
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