Beaker 0.15 currently removes the Take button from the system UI when
systems are in automated mode.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1015131 points out that
there's actually a valid use case for manually reserving an automated
system: when a system is loaned to you, you don't have the ability to
change it between Automated and Manual mode.
That means to allow the loanee to run jobs against the system through
the scheduler, the system must be in Automated mode.
However, having it in automated mode and reserving it through the
scheduler means you have to remember to keep extending the watchdog - in
0.15 there's no ability to say "I'll return it when I'm done (or when
the system owner takes the system away from me)".
In 0.14, you could manually reserve a loaned system *even if* it was
nominally in Automated mode.
Given that the "reserve" permission makes no distinction between manual
and automatic reservations, I don't really want to provide the ability
to manually reserve automated systems without some kind of time limit or
other additional access control mechanism.
Accordingly, the solution I am considering is to *require* that a loan
be in place in order to manually reserve an Automated system. The
behaviour of the system UI would be as follows:
System in Manual mode (no current user):
- Take button visible
- Provision tab indicates user must reserve the system first
System in Automated mode (no current loan or user):
- Take button hidden
- Provision tab offers ability to schedule a provision operation
System in Automated mode (current loan, but no current user):
- Take button visible to the user with the loan
- Provision tab offers ability to schedule a provision operation with a
note saying to reserve the system to switch to manual provisioning
This approach means that "reserve" will grant the ability to schedule a
provision on a system in Automated mode, but you'll also need
"loan_self" (or a loan from someone with "loan_any") to switch to
manual
provisioning.
Thoughts?
Cheers,
Nick.
--
Nick Coghlan
Red Hat Infrastructure Engineering & Development, Brisbane
Testing Solutions Team Lead
Beaker Development Lead (
http://beaker-project.org/)