enhancement: allow to set a custom managment interface IP as provided by containerlab

[hellt]

currently a hardcoded management interface is used both in both boxen and vrnetlab (10.0.0.15). using a hardcoded interface prevent some external management systems to discover the nodes, as the "real" management address is seen as the one assigned by docker to a container, but when the node call-back home it reports its management addr to be 10.0.0.15 and not the one that was used during the discovery.

A proposal is for containerlab to add an argument with the allocated IP address and boxen to take this address and configure it for the management interface (as well as the hostfd qemu rules)

[carlmontanari]

seems reasonable to me, do you think there is any value in this being a "general" boxen thing (as in also in "local mode") or nah?

[hellt]

in the local mode you only touch the management during the install phase, right? there are no hostfwd qemu settings whatsoever?

[carlmontanari]

local mode we do hostfwd on mgmt port -- or in theory bridge (which I have working in a python prototype but never made it to boxen since I dont really care about that use case :))

[hellt]

soo, even though management port in local mode should be visible to the host OS as an interface, we do use hostforwarding? or wait, is local mode runs a VM inside a container as well?

[carlmontanari]

bridge mode never got re-implemented in go, so yeah, its all hostwfd for me (for now) (no container, just hostfwd on the Qemu instance).

I think/guess the question w respect to "local" mode is just: is there any reason to care about changing the ip when in hostfwd mode... the old python flavor has/had ability to set mgmt ip when in bridge mode, so if/when that comes back all good, and I think no reason to care for hostfwd... I think :)

[achurak]

Hello,

I assume this has never been implemented? Is there a workaround for this, even if it's manual? Cisco Nexus Dashboard absolutely refuses to onboard n9kv devices because of this problem (reported ip being different from the discovered one) nor does it support any other interfaces except mgmt0 unfortunately.

[hellt]

@achurak yes, no workaround so far as I know it

[carlmontanari]

yeah... hopefully look for some overhauls to boxen starting in the next few months... been long over due and should have some more focus/time for this I hope!