Author Archives: Michael Iudiciani

CS 401 Multi-Week Update:

Dear CS 401 Community and to those Eucalyptus Devs reading this,

So I haven’t posted in a few weeks due to a friend being extremely sick. However, I would like to write down some of my accomplishments over the last few weeks to show that I have still been committed to working on the Eucalyptus project from the ICU lobby via wifi connection.

I have started to delve into the eucalyptus documentation more to see what I really want to want to work to improve. Granted my experience so far with the documentation will be regarding the installation of eucalyptus on dated hardware, I think the consensus in class was there may be a niche group out there that way want to experiment with eucalyptus on a budget. What better way to do so than on some machines you can get for free or for a very low price on craigslist?

Although this documentation revision that I will suggest may seem to dumb down their software’s documentation to almost novice linux user’s ability. I hope the documentation revisions I provide may be considered and contributes to Eucalyptus adding some “how to” links in between some of the steps for the those out there that might not be up to par as far as the level of knowledge for linux server administration goes.

By the end of the semester I hope to have improved the documentation for the set up of CentOS, hardware requirements directly explained and defined, and make the Eucalyptus installation more detailed to include the mistakes we made to save some of the next geeks some time.

Unfortunately I will not develop any code, I hope I will still contribute a significant amount through improving the documentation to be more friendly for novice linux server administrators. I started out this project having never used CentOS without a GUI and I learned a lot by forcing myself to only terminal commands. (Thanks to Dave Thompson)

My next post will include some of the examples of the changes I would like to see made to the documentation. So come back next week!

– Mike

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.

Week 7: Crossroads

Stroke of bad luck this week, we lost the head node due to a failed CPU fan. Dave has had a few bumps in the road due to a combination of software issues and system limitations. The conversation has been to bouncing back and forth solutions to the problem at hand.

Do we revert to CentOs 5 a no longer updated distro in an effort to get the cluster up? I wanted to pass this information to the rest of the class so I emailed this to the whole class in an effort to bring everyone into the loop and to understand the current predicament we are in.

New Hardware

Pros:

Immediately fixes the issue using the kvm hypervisor.
Will be a reusable asset for the CS department for years to come
Less frequent hardware issues

Cons: 

No spare parts or support can be provided by on site techs.
Most expensive option.
Will delay the completion of the cluster.

Old Hardware:

Pros:

Least expensive.
Cluster would be up for class utilization faster.
Our experience could help Eucalyptus streamline instructions for “ancient” machines.
On site tech support.

Cons:

This cluster would most likely only be viable for this semester.
Minimal resources will reduce the flexibility of the cluster.
Higher chance of hardware failure (already been proven)
Requires CentOs 5 which is no longer an updated distro of this OS.
Eucalyptus may not even be interested in new documentation on a build using CentOs 5. (guessing)

My Vote: (New Hardware)

In my opinion after evaluating the factors above, new machines are the better way to go even if it does mean a longer delay on the cluster’s completion. This may not have covered all the pro’s and con’s but I thought this was a good way to show the bottom line issues we are facing.

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.

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.

Week 4 and 5 Infrastructure Continued.

These last two weeks reading the Eucalyptus documentation has been my primary focus. Also I have been picking the brains of various IRC users in the Eucalyptus channel. Thanks to their help we chose the right distro of CentOS which is 6.1 instead of 6.2. However, had we not learned about IRC in class that same day I would not have known to have asked that question. The reason we don’t use 6.2 is that there were some Eucalyptus developers present in IRC warned me and saved me some time just use 6.1 due to the bugs being experienced with CentOS 6.2.

 I spend time working on the servers twice a week for about 3-4 hours prepping the systems for the cluster build. Reading through the documentation for Eucalyptus I wanted to work on the cluster without skewing the progress that Dave has been making. To stay out of his way and to move the project forward I have been taking care of the little things to prepare the servers for the Eucalyptus software.

For example, the documentation includes a step to sync the time on all NC’s, CC’s, and CLC’s before a successful install can be completed. Therefore, I installed NTP if not previously on the OS and synced it for our timezone and to the same server for each computer. Now all the computers in our cluster have identical times. NTP is the acronym for Network Time Protocol.

This picture is to show how simple a task this is to do once…and then remember to use the same settings on all 8 machines.

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.

Week 3 Creating the infrastructure

This week we worked on the infrastructure. So far installing the server’s shelves with some classmates along with installing CentOS on all 8 nodes. Sifting through a lot of documentation I learned the basics of how to create a cluster using a GUI as a crutch. However, Dave Thompson will probably show me the true Computer Science way and we will run this cluster on all terminal based machines. The infrastructure is taking longer than I originally planned but we did start from scratch with an empty server rack. Also collaboration with other classmates whose time on campus is very limited to dedicate to this part of the project makes it difficult but not impossible to move forward.

I am excited to get this cluster up, network administration is my real passion and this part of the project is where I will really enjoy working.

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.

Week 2

This week we had to read through some articles about the basics of using IRC. Each of us had to write about two possible FOSS projects that we would be interested in contributing to. I recommended that we contribute to two popular projects Libre Office and Mozilla. During class last week we had to work with a partner through IRC only to learn about each other and develop a bio page on each other. This helped us learn how restricting it can be working at separate locations on the same project.

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.

Week 1

Goals for this semester:

I really hope to work on a open source project that I can use as part of my resume to show that I am comfortable working in a team environment on a project that spans multiple locations. This should be easily  met considering the version control software, the assignments we will be a working on.

I enjoyed the readings mostly Chapter 3. About the challenges working on projects added to from across the globe. Conflicts on the language the comments should be in was the pretty funny. Linus Torvald wrote his kernel comments in English…even though it was his third language.

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.

First Post for CS 401

It was the first day of class for the CS 401 group.

The first accomplishment of the class we divided the class into randomly selected groups, reviewed Open Source Software, Licenses, and skills to be obtained through the course work.

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.