#4200 Template.pm does not handle attr sub-values

The code to substitute table attributes in install templates is not able to handle complex attributes such as nicips.ib0 where the nicips is a comma-delimited string of multiple values, but only a specific value is desired.

This was posted to the mailing list:

From:   Jonathan Mills <jonmills@renci.org>
To: xCAT Users Mailing list <xcat-user@lists.sourceforge.net>
Date:   07/09/2014 02:17 AM
Subject:    [xcat-user] Trouble accessing nicips.<nicname> sub attributes

Hello,

I've got a pretty simple xCAT template macro like so:

IPADDR="TABLE:nics:$NODE:nicips.ib0#

When I run 'nodeset' I get ugly output like

nodeset compute-7-28 osimage=centos-x86_64-install-compute
compute-7-28: Error: Unable to find requested nicips.ib0 from nics, with 
node=compute-7-28
Error: Some nodes failed to set up install resources on server hatteras, 
aborting

The entry for this node in my 'nics' table looks like:

"compute-7-28","ib0!10.4.31.2,em1!10.4.15.2","ib0!.ib",,"ib0!Infiniband,em1!Ethernet",,"ib0!infiniband,em1!kickstart",,,

Problem is consistent for any node name -- just using compute-7-28 as an 
example.

Also, an `lsdef` shows that xCAT is in no way confused about the entries 
in my nics table:

# lsdef compute-7-28
Object name: compute-7-28
     ...
     nichostnamesuffixes.ib0=.ib
     nicips.ib0=10.4.31.2
     nicips.em1=10.4.15.2
     nicnetworks.ib0=infiniband
     nicnetworks.em1=kickstart
     nictypes.ib0=Infiniband
     nictypes.em1=Ethernet
     ...

I'm confused about how to get at the IP address for this infiniband 
interface via the nics table from a kickstart template macro.  Other 
similar macros seem to work fine.  My only suspicion is that perhaps I'm 
not handling the sub-attribute in the right way, syntax-wise. Any ideas?

-- 
Jonathan Mills
Systems Administrator
Renaissance Computing Institute
UNC-Chapel Hill

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Open source business process management suite built on Java and Eclipse
Turn processes into business applications with Bonita BPM Community Edition
Quickly connect people, data, and systems into organized workflows
Winner of BOSSIE, CODIE, OW2 and Gartner awards
http://p.sf.net/sfu/Bonitasoft
_______________________________________________
xCAT-user mailing list
xCAT-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xcat-user

[Guang Cheng Li]

This is not supported because the nicips.ip is not a table column, it is kind of "virtual" attributes only recognized by *def commands, I do not think we want spend effor to fix this for now, I added this into the xCAT wishlist.