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The rudimentary lab management capabilities currently offered by Beaker are being phased out (and no new such features are being added), in order to better focus Beaker development effort on its two primary use cases (shared access to a wide range of hardware configurations for both manual failure investigation and automated compatibility testing). However, there's one key feature that would be useful given this clearer demarcation of responsibilities: the ability to add a reference to a separate Data Centre Inventory Management system like openDCIM. Even an installation that didn't have a proper lab management system could use such a mechanism to link to wiki page or other source of additional information. A Lab Management URL should also be added to lab controllers, allowing a direct link to additional details about the lab in general (perhaps that should be a separate RFE?).
This would also involve making a read only Lab Controller page available to regular users. Perhaps as a new submenu under Systems?
Chatting with Dan on IRC made me realise this idea didn't really add anything over the existing System Notes feature for ordinary systems (especially since 0.15+ allows hyperlinks in notes via Markdown) However, there's currently no place to add extra information on the individual hardware labs, and a hyperlink out to an external page would be a better way to do that than adding a whole bunch of detailed fields to Beaker itself (since the main thing we really care about for automation purposes is the FQDN of the lab controller and we already store that). So reducing the scope of this proposal to be just: - add an optional "Lab Details" URL to the stored lab controller info - make the read only list of Lab Controllers available to non-admin users in the main navigation menu as "Systems->Lab Controllers"
Also, the read only view should exclude removed labs (those are only shown to admins by default so they're easy to add back later).
I'm closing this item. It seem that there is no need for storing additional information in Beaker to accommodate openDCIM any more. It is currently not used or will not be used in the future.