[FEA]: Optionally allow host lockdown to be disabled in expected-machines.json

[pmilano-nvidia]

Is this a new feature, an improvement, or a change to existing functionality?

New Feature

How would you describe the priority of this feature request

Medium

Please provide a clear description of problem this feature solves

Allow optional flag in expected-machines.json to disable lockdown. Currently, we have to manually disable lockdown during the ingestion process anyway, so a flag to allow it would prevent manual intervention.

Feature Description

From automation engineer perspective, I want to be able to simply add an optional 'lockdown:false' field to the expected-machines.json so that lockdown is auto-disabled during the ingestion process, allowing the ingestion automation to work e2e without manual intervention.

Describe your ideal solution

expected-machines.json format:

{ 
"expected_machines": [ {
    "bmc_mac_address": "C4:5A:B1:C8:38:0D",
    "bmc_username": "root",
    "bmc_password": "password",
    "chassis_serial_number": "SERIAL-1",
    "lockdown": "false"
  }]
}

Describe any alternatives you have considered

Running CLI commands during ingestion (manual, error-prone, doesn't scale)
Manually disabling Lockdown in BMC Console during ingestion (manual, doesn't scale)

Additional context

No response

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow NVIDIA Bare Metal Manager's Code of Conduct
• I have searched the open feature requests and have found no duplicates for this feature request

[ajf]

We can probably model this like we're doing with DPF which is a per-host switch with the initial state being in expected machines. This pattern has come up a few times (per device config with an initial reasonable default). Should we build something more general like a "profile" for a host which includes these settings? This exists in the config file already but not for stuff that affects the state machine progression.

cc @kensimon @Matthias247

[pmilano-nvidia]

A profile the hosts sounds good -- ideally a 'default' profile that each host inherits, and a host-level profile that overrides the default?

Thanks for the quick triage 🙏