IP address information may not be relevant

[manu.blot@…]

Whenever the master and the slave are not on the same network and communicate through a NAT device, the IP address that is stored on the master is not relevant. It carries no information about the slave host - as the master "sees" the slave as the NAT machine.

For instance, in our environment the Trac+SVN server is located in a DMZ, but the slave machines are located on a private LAN.

It would be nice that the slave sends its IP address along with its name to the master, rather than the master stores the IP source its receives.

[osimons]

Right, the IP address it not all that useful except matching the 'owner' of the running build. If we switch to using a token-based system for handling this, then we should also review the actual need for using/storing IP address - see #421.

[osimons]

Following the fix for #421, the IP address is just used for diplay as additional information in addition to slavename (Built by: theslave (192.168.1.33). Seeing that the slave name can be set using using --name=theslave option, that may not correspond to the real machine name either. Hopefully at least one information item will be enough to resolve any ambiguity for properly identifying slaves - which is the only purpose for displaying this information.

For your use-case, other Trac modules like wiki and ticket ++ will also store the same (wrong) IP address as part of changes. If nothing else it will be consistently wrong :-)

I'm tempted to leave it at that and close this ticket, but I'll listen to arguments for why it is worth adding code and configuration to ensure that the IP displayed is the actual IP used by slave to make the request. The other side of this is of course the situations where the NAT IP is the only point of fixed knowledge as slave IPs are subject to change at any time, and if 'real' would only display a number from quite uninformative internal IP ranges.

Is it worth adding code, configuration and docs for this? Or should we just remove the display of IP? Or just leave it as-is?

[eblot]

Replying to osimons:

For your use-case, other Trac modules like wiki and ticket ++ will also store the same (wrong) IP address as part of changes. If nothing else it will be consistently wrong :-)

Just a quick update, as I have unfortunately no time to try the proposed change: Is the IP address the gateway/NAT address, or the address of the slave?

If it's the latter, I think it is ok, no need to add extra code/doc