Glossary

This section contains brief definitions of the terms used in Vaxiin.

Device

Hi, I’m Dave.
A host, which may, or may not, be a zombie. Currently, we support physical servers. These are the first constructs that need to exist in the system, as everything ties back to them. If you’re doing GitOps, load these first.

Screenshot

I see you, Dave.
A screenshot of the device’s out-of-band video feed. This is what you’d see if you were to connect to the BMC via its web interface and open a remote video session.

Creds

The key to Dave’s heart.
Credentials used to access a device via its out-of-band interface. You can have several of these, with one set as default. If only one set of credentials exists, we’ll automatically set it as the default set.

State

Zombie type.
The host’s screenshot + its OCR output. Think of it as “the device’s current situation”. You can have multiple resolved states per device (think of them as "history"), but only a single unresolved one.

Action

Zombie cure.
An operation to perform against a device, meant to change its state. It could be a sequence of keys, a special key combo or calling a provisioning system prior to rebooting a device. It’s the stuff you’d have manually done to bring a zombie back to life.

Rule

Zombie type <-> Zombie cure.
The thing binding actions to a state. It’s the “when you see this kind of zombie, here’s how you cure it” instruction. Rules are evaluated in order, and the thing that triggers a rule is a regex match against a state.

Work

Go out and cure those zombies!
The act of assigning an to perform against a device. It could be obtaining a new state, attempting recovery via a specific rule or running the whole list of them by order.