Author Archives: nathandoe

EUTester

This week we broke into two groups, the install group – which will focus on getting the Eucalyptus cluster up and running –  and the research group – which is looking into various aspects of EUTester and Eucalyptus. I opted for the research group about EUTester. EUTester is a python framework for testing a Eucalyptus cloud instance to make sure that it is working and was installed correctly. This will probably be a very important utility since there are so many people working on the setup of the cluster, and nobody has ever set one up before.

I don’t have much experience with python, so installing the EUTester was new for me. Although it was not hard to figure out, it was a learning experience. So far I have only found that in order for EUTester to work correctly that there needs to be a configuration file added on the Eucalyptus cluster. I found meeting notes from doing a google search that helped explain some of the aspects of EUTester. http://lists.eucalyptus.com/pipermail/community/2012-January/000210.html

My goal this week is to continue to do research on EUTester and figure out where it is supposed to be installed (either the cluster or on individual laptops). I am also hoping to work through some of the python source code of EUTester so I can figure out what exactly it is doing.

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

Getting Euca2ools

While we wait for the Eucalyptus cluster to get up and running, I started to get the euca2ools package installed and working on my laptop. At first I was going to try and get the package installed on my Mac, it turns out that it is possible to get euca2ools on Mac, but you have to play around with the dependencies and build scripts from what I found; but after doing some research, playing around with the source, and getting frustrated, I decided to just create a virtual machine running Ubuntu (since it was the only OS image I had at the time). Once got Ubuntu working, It was pretty straight forward to get euca2ools installed. The documentation was pretty straight forward.

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

Picking Open Source Project

Today in class we started to discuss which open source project we should have as our class project. At times it was a little chaotic, but we ended up all voting for favorites. The project that I wanted to work on the most was Sage, the program used on campus for the math department. Unfortunately, Sage only got one other vote, so it was tossed out. Eucalyptus was my second choice, because they seem to have many active contributors that would be willing to help us out. My last choice was Irrcht, because I’ve never done anything with graphic rendering or 3-D modeling (so I figured it would be fun to learn if it was picked).

Dr. Wurst is considering breaking up the class into two groups (Eucalyptus and Irrcht got the most votes) so I guess we will see what happens… Out of the two I think I would rather work on Eucalyptus because it seems like it has more relevance to the fields I would like to go into. Greg, from Eucalyptus, was on the IRC channel for little bit today as well. He suggested that we read up on cloud networking and EC2 (Amazon supercomputer). I am a little nervous about the amount of coding that would be done for the Eucalyptus project. It seems like it would be more of writing documentation than doing actual coding. Either way, I am excited to get working on an open source project!

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

IRC/Wiki Editing

Last week in class was my first experience using IRC. I downloaded a nice client for my Mac called LimeChat. It was a very cool experience to see new people from somewhere around the world join the channel and start talking to the class. The assignment that we had in class was to ask someone on the IRC channel to edit our wiki page – that we set up on the Teaching Open Source website.

It didn’t take long to see how useful IRC channels could be for an Open Source project. When people (outside our class) joined the channel, they jumped right in and started talking and answering questions. However, the one downside that I saw to using IRC channels, is that there was many conversations going on. At times it was hard to follow all of the discussion. Overall I thought that this exercise in getting to know IRC channels was very useful.

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

CS401 First Post

I am excited to work on a big open source project. I have never had an experience working with a project with more than 25 classes before, so I think this will be a good experience. I have worked with git on a very basic level, but never anything with merging content with others, so I am also looking forward to learning how more advanced git operations are performed/how they work. By then end of the semester I hope to have accomplished learning all about git/revision control systems, and have a good amount of experience with large scale debugging tools.

I think it will be interesting working with a group for a whole semester, and will give the feel of how software production departments run (on a smaller scale possibly).

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