Monthly Archives: March 2012

Week of Feb 27th 2012

This week I read Chapter 5: Buiding the Code on http://teachingopensource.org/index.php?title=Building_the_Code&oldid=3622. I found this chapter to be very helpful and informative. It provided great tips and information regarding the best way to go about building the code for your FOSS. The information about installing and configuring the source code was especially helpful. I also read Chapter 4: Stuff Everyone Knows and Forgets Anyway in the book In The Open Source Way on http://www.theopensourceway.org/book/The_Open_Source_Way-Stuff_everyone_knows_and_forgets_anyway.html. This chapter also provided some great tips and information regarding simple things that one should be mindful of when they are working within a team on an FOSS. The biggest tip discussed was on open and thorough communication through direct means as well as mailing lists. I found this to be an important tip that made a lot of sense. I then assessed Eucalyptus against The Open Source Way’s checklist for determining whether a project is doomed to fail. The list of questions to determine is available at: http://theopensourceway.org/wiki/How_to_tell_if_a_FLOSS_project_is_doomed_to_FAIL. I found it difficult to find some of the answers to some of the questions asked in the list. Therefore it was not easy to assess the project completely. I feel that it is difficult to predict whether the project is going to be a failure or not until we’ve completed it. This is because I personally have never worked on an FOSS of any kind and cloud computing is a completely new world to me. I am hopeful that it will be a learning experience and that I will gain a better knowledge and understanding, at the least, about working in a team on an FOSS.

From the blog nzahid » WSU CS by nzahid and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Post for 2/28

We are moving forward with the Eucalyptus project. Our cluster is set, and the initial components of the Eucalyptus Cloud are in place. Our contribution to this project will be on improving a piece of test-software appropriately named Eutester. Written 100% in Python (note to self: learn Python), the program is intended to be run like a command-line script to test a running cloud.
Our project for the week included a couple articles to read, one on building executable code from the source code, and the other articles was “Stuff everyone knows and forgets anyway”, a basic reminder to keep everything out in the open, ect.

From the blog sflynn1976 » wsu-cs by sflynn1976 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Meeting 4: Getting to know Git

So in this meeting, the class and I will be getting to know more about Git, which is a version control system for a project, more can be read on its official website git-scm.com or github.com, a website devoted entirely to Git. So first off, I have to have Git on my system, which is an Ubuntu OS. 3 ways to get Git: downloading from its site, using the command: apt-get install git-core, or using the software center. There was also an exercise that we got to do to set up Git, edit personal info, and played with a repository. It was my first time experiencing Git so there was some confusions in me but it was a good start. At least I know some basics through the exercise. So I’m going to go through the tutorial on the Git website to get a better understanding of the system.

From the blog longnguyen16 » wsu-cs by watever10 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week of 27 Feb 2012: Documentation Project

Spent the day working on a glossary for Eucalyptus. Have the framework done, and several actual entries. Placed working copy at
http://cs.worcester.edu/wiki/index.php?n=DanAdams.Home

This was interesting because I had to pour over the Installation guide, and the Eucalyptus website. I also spent a lot of time on wikipedia. I tried to include terms in the glossary that I was fuzzy on, as well as those others might not be familiar with. There are also a few old chestnuts such as “TCP/IP’ and “Open Source Software” Overall, I think it is a pretty good start.

I started it out on an open office doc, and thought I could just copy & paste it onto a school wiki. No such luck! I then had to spend over an hour editing the content so it looks right.

A big job & a lot of work.

From the blog danspc.net Blog » wsucs by danspc.net Blog » wsucs and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week 6 Working Offsite with Screen

This week we reorganized groups. Coady has joined up with Dave and I on the infrastructure team and has connected via ssh as well to help prepare the nodes for the eucalyptus software. It is nice to know that everyone is on the same page as far as our collective understanding of the Eucalyptus design we our trying to construct.

To work on becoming more effective from offsite, Dave suggested I try using a terminal based program called Screen. To connect via SSH to multiple nodes simultaneously and be able to log off and on without losing your work is a huge help improvement in my ability to work offsite on multiple nodes of our matrix cluster. I took a screenshot of the home screen with the introduction. I don’t think every student will need the ability to SSH into the cluster’s nodes so this is really to just an informative post on how to be more efficient on working offsite on multiple servers.

From the blog Mike's Blog. [ CS 401 ] by Michael Iudiciani and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Fail Meter Analysis of Eucalyptus

Professor Wurst decided after viewing this article that we should gauge the project that we plan on spending an entire semester, I guess now is the best time do find out is after we’ve committed to the project. Kind of thought it was a bit silly at first but the more I worked on the test the more I learned about Eucalyptus. After all was said and done it turns out the project isn’t going to completely bomb, which wouldn’t have been the best for the class, or the project…

The tests are broken into several categories:

Size
Source Control
Building From Source
Bundling
System Install
Code Oddities
Communication
Releases
History
Licensing
Documentation

It’s about a 60 something questioner, each question assigns a “fail” value to it and tallies it up at the end. Some of the questions were pretty silly like, “ Your website doesn’t have any documentation” (this isn’t a question, I know).

I learned a pretty good amount about Eucalyptus with this project, pretty much because 50% of what I was looking at had me scratching my head or asking “How would I even find that out”. Got to poke around the source code online in git and on a website called fossies the link I gave is directly to the Eucalyptus section of it. Also this is the my first “big project” of code that I’ve looked at and it feels pretty daunting to see so much code spread out in so many classes but, it’s also awesome to see it all working in unison.

For now my main goal is to continue to read wiki’s and try to play around with Euca2ools and be able to be much more fluent on the systems so I’m not like a lost puppy.

From the blog jamescelona » WSU CS by jamescelona and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sorry for the Absence

Unfortunately I haven’t posted in a pretty long time, and I’m sorry about that to those few who are following.

Recently my main focus was to pick a distribution of Linux I wanted to use. I tried mint and cent and didn’t much care for either of them, to be frank. I’ve been using Archlinux for one of my classes and love learning though that distro but it proved to be an extra level of difficulty I could do without in this class, pretty much I kept bothering Dave about this or that and felt back. I ended up talking with some friends and they suggested Xubuntu which is a lightweight distro of Ubuntu. Since I am running the OS in a virtual box the more lightweight the better. I reinstalled Git and Euca2ools and have just been reading a wiki every now and then. I am eager to really start the class once the cluster is all set up and I know how to use it properly.

I’ll be posting again tomorrow about our homework assignment once I finish it (aka start it)

From the blog jamescelona » WSU CS by jamescelona and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS 401 – Building a Small Cluster with Eucalyptus

I consider myself an amateur system administrator. I know my way around a Linux machine. I know how to use basic command line utilities. I know how to use Vim. I work on servers at my internship. I maintain about 4. Now, here I am in CS 401… with 8 machines that I need to not only install an OS on and configure, but make them talk to each other as a full Eucalyptus cluster. It’s taking far longer to set this up than expected, but I feel accomplished because it took a lot of work to get to where I am today.

Understanding Eucalyptus

I came into this project knowing literally nothing about cloud computing. But from reading the Eucalyptus documentation, I have a vague understanding of what the various components do.

The first component is the Cloud Controller (CLC). The CLC is the gateway for access to a cluster. It basically runs the show. Note that I said clusters, plural. The CLC make high-level decisions and talks to the cluster controllers. Next, is Walrus, a persistent storage system for the users virtual machine images. The data is organized into buckets (get it?). Walrus can be installed on the same server as the CLC. The Cluster Controller (CC) is in charge of managing several Node Controllers (NCs). The CC also handles access to the Storage Controller (SC) which interfaces with different storage methods. The NCs are servers that run a virtual machine hypervisor (such as KVM or Xen). The hypervisor manages all the virtual machines (VMs) that are running on the server. Put it all together and you have yourself a cloud!

Preparing Servers

My class has 8 machines running CentOS 6.1. One server will be the CLC, running Walrus as well. One server will be the CC/SC. The remaining 6 will be our nodes. If combining tasks on the servers becomes a problem, it shouldn’t be too difficult to move them to other servers, the only downside being that we will have less NCs.

I was confused about which VM hypervisor was going to be installed on the machines. All of the Eucalyptus 2.0 guides were giving instructions to install Xen. However, when I tried to install the Xen packages, they were not found. After some googling, I learned that with CentOS 6, support for Xen was dropped in favor of KVM.

Compiling from Source

I grabbed the latest and greatest code from the Eucalyptus Launchpad page. I found 3 helpful documents that allowed me to successfully build Eucalyptus. one two three. I’ve been documenting the process as I go on the CS 401 Wiki. It took A LOT of reading and some help from the #eucalyptus IRC channel, but I did it! CS 401 is now in possession of some fresh 3.1 binaries.

Installing Eucalyptus

Now that I have Eucalyptus 3.1 built, I need to install it on all of our machines. I have been using rsync to copy the binaries to the other servers. The CLC, CC, SC, Walrus, and NC require different Eucalyptus services to be running in order for them to function. As of this writing I am currently having some trouble initializing the databases on the NCs.

I’ve made more progress this past week than any other week so far. Hopefully we can have a functional system in a week’s time.

From the blog David Thompson » WSU CS by davexunit and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week of 27 Feb 2012: Freeciv

This was an interesting week. I began by working my way through Chapter 5: Building the Code

http://teachingopensource.org/index.php?title=Building_the_Code&oldid=3622

From Practical Open Source Software Exploration. I went through the steps of installing all the dependencies and configuring Freeciv. This is a FOSS role playing game inspired by the popular “Civilizations” MMP.

As predicted in the text, I ran into many problems not covered in the game documentation. I would get a build error, track it down, rebuild, and run into the next error. I found some good help on the forums at http://forum.freeciv.org/ .

The terminal command “./autogen.sh” would attempt to build the project. It would then take a while to build before you could tell if you had success or not. When at last I received no errors, I entered ‘make’ to compile the project.

This was a good confidence-building exercise. Normally, if a game took this much work to get it to run, I would quit & move on to something else.