Category Archives: Eucalyptus

Meeting 5: EuTester and Eucalyptus Assessment

An useful tool that will help us alot while working with Eucalyptus cloud computing is EuTester. EuTester is a framework written in Python and is used as a test tool to test the Eucalyptus private cloud setup. It is designed to allow a user to quickly generate automated tests for testing a Eucalyptus or Amazon cloud. From what I found out, to be able to testing out EuTester, I need to have at least an instance running on the Eucalyptus cloud, but currently our cloud is still under the progress of setting up and I tried but couldn’t get into any other clouds. So right now, I haven’t had a chance to test out EuTester yet. Note that if you are running a Unix system, all the pre-requisites for EuTester are already installed.

Another subject we were dicussing in this meeting was how would we rate the Eucalyptus project? Is it a promising project? Or is it a failed one? So to find out, we would assess it based on a scale written by a guy name Tom Callaway. Based on him, a project can be rated based on 12 aspects: Size, Source Control, Building From Source, Bundling, Libraries, System Install, Code Oddities, Communication, Releases, History, Licensing, and Documentation. There were several questions under each aspects and FAIL points that go for each of those questions. If a question can be applied to the project, it will earn that much points, the more points the project is graded, it is destined to doom. Well anyway, it was tough to rate Eucalyptus because I couldn’t find much information on it to answer the questions, especially for Building From Source and System Install aspects. I know that Eucalyptus website provides a lot of documentation. So that was a good start. Looking through wiki, Eucalyptus forum, and many blogs, I would give Eucalyptus a score of 70 FAIL points. So it’s like right in the middle of the FAIL scale, not bad but not so good.

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

Week 3: Choosing a Project

Prior to week 3, everyone had a homework assignment to research and submit summaries on two open source projects that they would like to work on. The first I chose was Firefox. I liked Firefox as a potential class project because of the extensive documentation the development community provided, and the relative ease of “jumping in” and becoming a contributor. There was also a helpful list of suggested projects that were an appropriate size for an entire class to tackle. The second project I researched was FreeDroid, an open source roleplaying game similar to Diablo. The game is mostly finished at this point, but there was a lot of help needed for bug fixes and game engine optimizations. It would have been harder to get started with than Firefox, but I thought it would have been very cool to work on a video game!

During last week’s IRC exercise in #teachingopensource, we met a developer of an open source cloud platform called Eucalyptus who was lurking in the channel. It turns out that they had just finished developing version 3 of the platform, and were interested in our class helping them by testing it. Professor Wurst wanted us to adopt this as our course project, but decided to be democratic about it and put it up to a vote. We were all asked to rank 6 of the projects that were suggested by our combined research: Eucalyptus, Firefox, LibreOffice (office suite), irrlicht (3d game engine renderer), VLC (media player), and Sage (math software). I personally wanted to see Firefox, LibreOffice, Eucalyptus, or irrlicht as the winning project. Eucalyptus ended up winning, with irrlicht as a close second. After Professor Wurst determined that there was not enough support for a second irrlicht group, it was decided that as a class we would be working exclusively on Eucalyptus.

From the blog Code Your Enthusiasm » WSU CS by Jon and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Cloud Computing and Me

This past week I did something which I have never done before: I helped to set up a cluster to be used for cloud computing. The cluster is not yet fully armed and operational, but it’s getting there. I met up with my friend Mike one afternoon shortly after he and another of our classmates had finished putting a server rack together. We then loaded eight Dell GX270’s onto the rack and started the long and arduous process of cable management and wiring the machines together. The wiring itself went fast, but we spend about an hour and a half just working on the cable management to ensure that everything looked nice and we had easy access to everything we needed.

Once we finished with the wiring it was time to begin the OS installs. For this cluster we chose to use CentOS 6.1 since that’s what the folks over at Eucalyptus suggested we use. Sadly we were only able to get the OS up and running on two of the machines before we both had to leave to attend to other obligations.

I am very much looking forward to learning more about cloud computing. Before last Wednesday I had never set up a cluster and now I know how to use a KVM and all the other various gadgets and tech goodies that go along with setting up a cluster/server. Now I get to look forward to learning how to turn eight individual machines into a cluster, followed by learning how to use that cluster for cloud storage and processing. We aren’t even halfway through the semester and I’ve already learned a lot so I cannot wait to see what the following weeks have in store.

From the blog The Mind of Mattamizer » WSU CS by mattamizer and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.