Rollcall does what MAAS does when a new server first shows up: PXE-boot an ephemeral image, take a full hardware inventory, create an administrator account on the BMC, and remember the machine. No cloud controller, no agents on your OS, no fleet of services.
A machine goes from unknown to ready in one boot, without anyone typing anything.
dnsmasq hands out DHCP and TFTP. Unknown MACs land on the default pxelinux menu, which starts commissioning after 8 seconds.
A Debian 13 live image (full kernel, non-free firmware, IB and NVMe tooling) is fetched over HTTP and runs from RAM. Disks are never touched.
DMI, DIMMs, CPUs, disks with SMART, NVMe, NICs with firmware and link, InfiniBand HCAs, GPUs, every PCI device, LLDP switch ports, TPM.
In-band ipmitool finds the LAN channel and creates commissioner with ADMINISTRATOR rights and a random password.
Everything is posted to the server. The password is sealed with AES-256-GCM before it reaches PostgreSQL. The machine powers off.
A per-MAC PXE file stops future boots of the image. Power and boot device are controlled through the API, UI or CLI, with ipmitool running on the server.
Small surface, enterprise hardware in mind.
HTTP API, embedded web UI, CLI subcommands, schema migrations and PXE bookkeeping ship as a single static Go executable. Deploy with scp.
BMC passwords are encrypted at rest with a local master key, never returned by the API, and only ever used by ipmitool inside the server process.
The image carries firmware for Broadcom, QLogic, Intel and Mellanox NICs, rdma-core, infiniband-diags, mstflint, nvme-cli, smartmontools, lldpd.
No in-band IPMI? Rollcall can map MACs to known BMCs. The repo ships pve-vbmc, an IPMI BMC emulator for Proxmox VMs, so the whole flow runs in a lab.
The live image authenticates with an agent token baked into the kernel command line; people and automation use a separate admin bearer token.
Drop the PXE override, set bootdev pxe and power-cycle through the BMC with one click or rollcall recommission ID -now.
Debian, Ubuntu, Rocky, AlmaLinux and CentOS Stream images are streamed onto the disk (curl | zstd | dd, sha256-verified) and seeded for cloud-init: hostname, SSH keys, optional upgrade, phone-home. No installer.
rollcall os sync watches the vendors' checksum files nightly, downloads only what changed, verifies it and flips a current symlink. Pin or promote versions; running jobs keep theirs.
Or skip the disk: boot a Debian root image into RAM, overlay slurm.conf, munge key, hosts and SSH keys rendered per node from the inventory.
On the host that already runs your DHCP/TFTP for the provisioning network.
# 1. database
sudo -u postgres psql \
-c "CREATE ROLE rollcall LOGIN PASSWORD 'secret';" \
-c "CREATE DATABASE rollcall OWNER rollcall;"
# 2. config
rollcall keygen # admin_token
rollcall keygen # agent_token
sudo install -d -m 0750 /etc/rollcall
sudo cp config.json /etc/rollcall/config.json
# 3. install binary, unit, pxelinux menu
cd deploy && sudo ./install.sh
# 4. build the live image (~8 min)
sudo ../agent/build-image.sh$ rollcall list
ID STATE MODEL RAM NIC IB BMC
m-2ef1dab828c8 ready Dell PowerEdge R760 1.0T 4 2 10.4.0.21 (inband,ok)
m-9c01a3bd7e12 ready Supermicro SYS-421GE 2.0T 6 4 10.4.0.22 (inband,ok)
$ rollcall power m-2ef1dab828c8 status
Chassis Power is on
$ rollcall show m-2ef1dab828c8 | head -3
m-2ef1dab828c8 state=ready
Dell Inc. PowerEdge R760 S/N 7XK2Q94
CPU: Intel Xeon Platinum 8468 sockets=2 ...Then point the UI at http://<server>/ and paste the admin token. Machines appear as they boot.
JSON over HTTP. Admin calls carry Authorization: Bearer <admin_token>; the agent sends X-Rollcall-Token.
| Method | Path | Who | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| POST | /api/v1/commission | agent | Inventory upload from the live image |
| GET | /api/v1/bmc-hint?macs= | agent | Out-of-band BMC hint for machines without in-band IPMI |
| GET | /api/v1/machines | admin | List with summaries (CPU, RAM, disks, NICs, IB, GPUs, BMC state) |
| GET | /api/v1/machines/{id} | admin | Full record: inventory, BMC (without secret), events |
| POST | /api/v1/machines/{id}/power | admin | {"action":"on|off|soft|cycle|reset|status"} |
| POST | /api/v1/machines/{id}/bootdev | admin | {"device":"pxe|disk|cdrom|bios|none"} |
| POST | /api/v1/machines/{id}/recommission[?now=1] | admin | Boot the image again on next PXE, or right now via the BMC |
| DELETE | /api/v1/machines/{id} | admin | Forget the machine |
Collected by rollcall-agent.py inside the live image and stored as JSON per machine.
Manufacturer, product, serial, UUID, SKU, baseboard, chassis, asset tag, BIOS vendor/version/date, TPM.
CPU model, sockets, cores, threads, NUMA nodes, caches, virtualization flags; memory total plus every DIMM slot with size, type, speed, vendor, part and serial.
All block devices with model, serial, bus, rotational flag, sector sizes, SMART health and firmware, NVMe list, storage controllers from PCI.
NICs with driver, firmware, speed, link state, permanent MAC, PCI address, NUMA node, SR-IOV capacity; LLDP neighbours to map switch ports.
HCAs with node and port GUIDs, firmware, board id, per-port state, physical state, rate, LID and link layer.
LAN channel, IP source, MAC, gateway, VLAN, firmware, FRU, user table before commissioning, created account and verification result.