How to model an inactive PCI card lying on a shelf in a storage cabinet?

[GeertRoks]

Hi all,

I am using Netbox Community v4.3.6-Docker-3.3.0 to track the state of our small server setup and think it is a very nice project!

We have a multitude of PCI devices, which mostly are installed in our servers. I modeled the cards using the Module type (I see this as a blueprint for a physical card, or Class in software terms) and then realize them as a Module. This works well when the modules are installed in a module bay in a server, but we also have some extra unused PCI cards stored in a cabinet. How does one model these?

I want to fill in the asset tag/Serial number for these PCI cards and something about the state in the comments. This allows us to see what we have in our storage and when they are installed I can then just update the location of the Module. However, the problem is that a Module requires a Device and Module bay. Does that mean I should model our storage cabinet as a device? Is that the intended way of doing it? (Seems a bit unintuitive/weird to me)

I also saw the Inventory Items and Inventory plugin, but as I read in the release notes, it seems that the Inventory items are getting deprecated in favor of the Modules. So how does one model a Module that does exist, but is not installed in a server at the moment?

Thanks :)

[sigprof]

NetBox core does not support the “stored” state for modules — every module must be inserted into some module bay ultimately belonging to a device. Even worse, NetBox currently does not support moving modules between devices (or even device bays on the same device); the only way to move the module is to delete the existing instance and then create a new module instance with the same attributes in the new device bay. So even if you pretend that your cabinet is a “device” with some large number of module bays, you would need to recreate those modules when moving them between the cabinet and the actual servers.

NetBox Inventory Plugin should be able to support “stored” state for modules, but I suppose that it just stores the serial number, asset tag and module type in a separate “asset” table, and recreates the module from scratch when moving it from storage into some device. This might be enough for your purposes of tracking what's in your storage though. And hopefully your modules are simple enough to be represented as single module objects in NetBox (some things like DAC cables and SFP E1-to-IP gateways are not — e.g., see ArnesSI/netbox-inventory#156 and the related comments in #19670).

There is also a feature request for NetBox asking for exactly what you want: #19003, but it's probably equivalent to the support for moving modules between devices (because if you have offline storage support, you can just move the module through the intermediate offline state).