Open Stack

tl;dr: Is anyone calling 'nova-novncproxy' or 'nova-serialproxy' with
CLI arguments instead of a configuration file?

I've been doing some untangling of the console proxy services that nova
provides and trying to clean up the documentation for same [1]. As part
of these fixes, I noted a couple of inconsistencies in how we manage
the CLI options for these services.

Firstly, the 'nova-novncproxy' and 'nova-serialproxy' services accept
CLI configuration options while the 'nova-xvpvncproxy' service does
not.

   $ nova-novncproxy --help
   usage: nova-novncproxy [-h] [--vnc-auth_schemes VNC_AUTH_SCHEMES]           
                          [--vnc-novncproxy_host VNC_NOVNCPROXY_HOST]     
                          [--vnc-novncproxy_port VNC_NOVNCPROXY_PORT]            
                          [--vnc-vencrypt_ca_certs VNC_VENCRYPT_CA_CERTS]    
                          [--vnc-vencrypt_client_cert VNC_VENCRYPT_CLIENT_CERT]
                          [--vnc-vencrypt_client_key VNC_VENCRYPT_CLIENT_KEY]    
                          [--cert CERT] [--config-dir DIR] [--config-file PATH]
                          ...
                          [--remote_debug-port REMOTE_DEBUG_PORT]

   $ nova-xvpvncproxy --help
   usage: nova-xvpvncproxy [-h] [--remote_debug-host REMOTE_DEBUG_HOST]         
                           [--remote_debug-port REMOTE_DEBUG_PORT]
                           ...
                           [--version] [--watch-log-file]

This means that you could, conceivably, run 'nova-novncproxy' without a
configuration file but the same would not be possible with the 'nova-
xvpvncproxy' service. Secondly, the 'nova-novncproxy' CLI options are
added to a 'vnc' group, meaning they appear with an unnecessary 'vnc-'
prefix (e.g. '--vnc-novncproxy_host'), and the 'nova-serialproxy' CLI
options are prefixed with 'serial-' for the same reason. Finally, none
of these options are documented anywhere.

My initial plan [2] to resolve all of the above had been to add the CLI
options to the 'nova-xvpvncproxy' service and then go figure out how to
get oslo.config autodocumenting these for us in our man pages. However,
a quick search through GitHub, codesearch.o.o and Google turned up no
hits so I wonder if anyone is configuring these things by CLI? If not,
maybe we should just go and remove this code and insist on
configuration via config file?

Cheers,
Stephen

[1] https://review.openstack.org/606148
[2] https://review.openstack.org/606929