We are finally beginning to delve into the world of cloud computing. The cloud that is being built on campus is almost complete and the team working on the installation is doing a great job and putting forth  a lot of their personal time to finish setting it up. In the meantime we have been given research assignments to coincide with the Eucalyptus installation to learn more about the project itself. I personally have been researching the bug tracking system that they are using. Currently you can access the bug tracker right from the http://open.eucalyptus.com/ page located under the participate menu item.

From here we are given links to different areas in the Eucalyptus project. You can go straight to the issue tracker and view the current support issues they are experiencing. There is also a link to the launchpad which hosts all of the open source code for Eucalyptus. The launchpad also has a link on the top to view current bugs and lists them by their priority.

I have only just begun researching this portion of the project and the rest of the class is also researching other components. We are doing this to familiarize ourself with the many various aspects of the project and it is helping us learn everything involved in a shorter amount of time. Hopefully by the time we have our next class the cluster will be up and running and we can really begin to learn how the project works and maybe even contribute to it.

From the blog michaelkenny2 » WSU CS by michaelkenny2 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week in our class we finally decided which project we will be working on all semester. This project will be the focal point of the course and I am very excited to get to work and learn more about it. We chose the Eucalyptus project, which is basically an open source cloud computing project. I have never experienced much with cloud computing but the setup alone interests me and I can’t wait to be able to add something like this to my resume.

A few things that we learned about Eucalyptus during the last class involved familiarizing ourselves with cloud computing products. We were given documentation to read up and learn more about Eucalyptus itself. They also recommended that we setup free accounts with Amazon EC2, which is Amazon’s cloud computing product, in order to get better experience with similar products. I also signed up for the Eucalyptus listserv in order to stay in the loop with what is going on regarding the project itself.

I look forward to working on this project and I would very much like to assist in the setup as well. I have networked multiple computers together, but I do not have a lot of experience with configuring the network using the command line and working with new operating systems, for example CentOS.

From the blog michaelkenny2 » WSU CS by michaelkenny2 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Last week for our second class we began learning how to use IRC to communicate with each other. This was a great exercise because it gave me a perspective of online chat I have never experienced. I have used other chat programs such as AIM, pidgin, but I have never done any real IRC that involved multiple members, some of which were located in other places across the country.

The main exercise we focused on was editing other classmates wiki pages on the Teaching Open Source Planet site without actually taking to each other, but instead entirely using IRC. I really enjoyed this exercise because it forced me to learn the basics of IRC and how to communicate effectively while using it. Hopefully we get to experience more IRC use during the course of the semester, because it is a great and effective development tool.

From the blog michaelkenny2 » WSU CS by michaelkenny2 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.