Category Archives: CS 401

Creating a bootable disk to flash BIOS

One of the issues that we had while setting up our cloud was incompatible BIOS revision on the machines we were using. They were out of date and did not allow the use of virtualization, so we had to update the BIOS a certain way with the DELL Executable that was the only way to update the BIOS was using an EXE.

 

The first step to creating the bootable disk was downloading FreeDOS so that we can boot up into FreeDOS and run the executable.

In order to do this you do: wget http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/autogen/FDOEM.144.gz

Then, gunzip FDOEM.144.gz to unzip the file.

 

The second step is to copy the BIOS flash utility and the BIOS image that needs to be used to upgrade, and mount it to a floppy disk image. Here is what you do in order to complete this step:

modprobe vfat

modprobe loop

mkdir /tmp/floppy

mount -t vfat -o loop FDOEM.144 /tmp/floppy

After mounting the Floppy you want to copy the EXE. that you downloaded for the BIOS:

cp DELLBIOSVERSION.exe /tmp/floppy (not actual name of the bios)

then unmount the floppy: umount /tmp/floppy

 

Step 3 is to burn the bootable CD which emulates a floppy device.

mkisofs -o bootcd.iso -b FDOEM.144 FDOEM.144
cdrecord -v bootcd.iso

After you have created this bootable disk, all you have to do is boot the CD in the machine and basically type in the EXE. and it will autoflash to the new bios.

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

CS401 – Creating the Wiki Articles

I am now actually consolidating the information our group researched and putting it into wiki articles. Right now I have the main page, the cloud controller, cluster controller, walrus and storage controller. I still need to do node controller and I need to go over everything and fix it up a bit.

Our group has also been working on the presentation that we will give during the final exam, and that is coming along well. Link to the wiki below.

 

http://cs.worcester.edu/wiki/index.php?n=Main.ArchitectureOverview

From the blog blabbecs401 » CS401 by blabbecs401 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS401 – Nearing the End

Well, the semester is almost over now, and the documentation is starting to shape up. There’s a lot of information that’s hard to track down, though, which is unfortunate. For now, what I am having to do is make an educated guess. Hopefully I will be able to either verify all of the information or someone from the Eucalyptus project or someone who’s had more experience with Eucalyptus can verify or clarify some of the information.

From the blog blabbecs401 » CS401 by blabbecs401 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS401 – Sick

This post is a couple days late because, unfortunately, I’ve been sick. In any case, the documentation is starting to come together, so we should have something useful by the end of the semester. I’ve still been waiting to here about what format the eucalyptus wiki will eventually be, so for the time being we are just keeping everything in plaintext format. Because of the fact that I was sick, I wasn’t able to do a much work as I wanted to, so I am not sure now how many images I’ll be able to produce. Hopefully when we submit our documentation to the eucalyptus project, someone will be able to continue where we leave off.

From the blog blabbecs401 » CS401 by blabbecs401 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

First Merge!

Following on Trevor Hodde‘s post First Commit!, it’s time to mention our First Merge!

First Nate Doe, and then Trevor, made commits to our class’ fork of the Eutester repository on GitHub. I submitted a pull request, which has now been merged into the master branch of the repository.

We’re looking forward to more commits, and having them merged into the project. I know that Nate and Trevor have issues assigned to them, and I think that Matt Morrisey will soon.

From the blog On becoming an Eccentric Professor... » CS@Worcester by Karl R. Wurst and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS401 – Writing Pages

Now I have been writing the wiki pages for individual components of the cloud.  I haven’t actually put them on the wiki yet, I want to flesh them out a bit more first. As I did my research, I realized that there’s a lot I’d like to write about in the wiki, but I am not sure if I will have time to be able to put all of it in before the semester is over. I’ll work on writing what I think are the most important parts, though.

From the blog blabbecs401 » CS401 by blabbecs401 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS401 – Continuing Progress

Getting pretty close to being able to write the bulk of the documentation for the overview of the eucalyptus cloud now. Comparing the Eucalyptus user/admin/installing guides to Amazon’s EC2 documentation is helping a lot to close some gaps in information.

 

I also started working on some images that will help with the documentation. One of them is just a picture to illustrate the general architecture, which isn’t a big deal because such images do exist already. The other is a template that can be used for illustrating how communications with and inside the cloud happen, which I think will be a nice thing to have.

From the blog blabbecs401 » CS401 by blabbecs401 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS401 – Eucalyptus and Amazon

Did some more research this week and found more ways in which Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus are similar. It looks like amazon’s S3 is pretty close to what Walrus does, and Amazon’s EBS is close to what the storage controller does.

This means that we’ll be able to look at amazon’s documentation to be able to fill in some of the gaps of information in eucalyptus’s documentation, which is good.

From the blog blabbecs401 » CS401 by blabbecs401 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS401 –

Well, we’re into actually working on the project now. I am working on creating some documentation on the general architecture of a Eucalyptus cloud. I feel like this will be a good thing for  the project to have. It appears as though the architecture of a Eucalyptus cloud is very similar to that of Amazon’s EC2. That should be a good starting point for describing the Eucalyptus cloud.

From the blog blabbecs401 » CS401 by blabbecs401 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS401 FLOSS Doomed to fail test

Personally, I think that the test we used ( http://www.theopensourceway.org/book/The_Open_Source_Way-How_to_tell_if_a_FLOSS_project_is_doomed_to_FAIL.html ) is pretty silly. The criteria range from mundane to inane, and seem to automatically discount any project that might happen to be windows only (Say, perhaps an open source C#.NET wrapper for DirectX? http://slimdx.org ). I think there is some good information, but other parts of it are strange (Being vaporware means your project is doomed to failure? Who would have guessed?)

In any case, testing eucalyptus with this doesn’t really tell you anything about the project because it’s a long established project.

This week we also split into new groups and started working on seperate projects. I’ll be working on adding documentation to provide a more in depth overview of the eucalyptus architecture.

From the blog blabbecs401 » CS401 by blabbecs401 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.