Category Archives: CS401

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.

FOSS Field Trip Choosing the Right Project

Week three was dedicated to our search for an open source project we would like to work on. Since were doing the assignment “FOSS Field Trip 2” we would each bring 2 projects to discuss. It sounded simple enough, but the class was divided between two projects. Eucalyptus for which we had the support of mentors already in the program, and they had asked us to join; including a proposal with their ambitions of what they hoped to accomplish with our help. Irrlicht which was a project one of our class mates has worked on before, and has contact with many of the developers still, we were told that we would be building a test suite for their 3D engine. It came down to a vote where eucalyptus won due to the support that the two mentors showed, and their proposal which gave us a real plan for the future of the class.

From the blog WSU CS – Live and Code by dhimitraq and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Discussion on proposed Projects

Last week their was a class discussion on which projects the class most wanted to work on. Two projects that i had researched a bit that i though would have been interesting included Mumble or PuTTY, but i figured that these projects might not have been substantial enough for the whole class.

Some of the bigger projects that seemed to be top picks included Eucalyptus, Irrchlicht, Mozilla, Chromium, and OpenOffice. There wasn’t a real certainty of what each person wanted to work on, so we did a class vote to see what the front runners were going to be. The projects that came out ahead included Eucalyptus, Irrchlicht, and Mozilla. After the final shuffling of the votes however the project that had the majority of votes was Eucalyptus.

There was also a class discussion going on at the same time in the IRC Channel, however i was not able to get into the chat because of certain hardware issues i was having with my laptop that day.

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

IRC Chat Excercise

During class we were all introduced into the world of IRC Chat. The exercise that we were given to complete was for you and a partner to edit each other’s profile pages on the Learning Open Source site, but with certain rules attached. In order to complete the assignment we had to only communicate using the IRC channel, talking back and forth in chat.

The whole process was very intriguing because the whole class was silent with chuckles filling the room every once in a while. Although this is wasnt my first time in an IRC Chat environment, it was my first time partaking in an IRC that contained class mates of mine during a class, and talking about the various subject matters going on, such as possible projects to work on.

Over the course of the semester i am sure that the IRC chat will become a very useful tool in communicating with others on the current project we will be working on, and also be a tool that we could use when we have questions, such that we can go on the IRC channel and ask the question we seek an answer to.

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

CS401 Picking a Project

Well, I am disappointed that I don’t get to work on irrlicht. That project is one that helped me learn C++ and learn about rendering, so it would have been nice to have the chance to give back to the project a little bit.

I have worries about working on eucalyptus, that we won’t actually get to do any software development, that we may end up just trying to fix broken documentation. All I can do at this point is hope that I’m wrong and try to get something done.

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

CS401 IRC/Wiki

A couple weeks ago what we did in class was use IRC and wiki. Not really sure how much I can say on it, as neither were really new to me. I think IRC is a great way to be able to meet and talk to people that you would otherwise not get the opportunity to do. It’s more immediate than forums which helps to add the possibility of more details in a conversation.

Wiki, of course, is a good tool for documention a project. It’s easy to edit, and it can be opened for anyone to edit, which means that there are less barriers for new sources of information being introduced.

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

CS 401: Project Decision

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.

CS 401: IRC/Wiki Edit

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.

Hello blogging world and CS401

I have used computers since I was 10 years old; however in this 11 years I have not blogged before, so I am expecting it to be an interesting experience.

I use multiple Free Open Source Software (ex: multiple Linux OS distributions, Chromium browser, Apache web server, and many more), and I have occasonally visited the IRC channels, or support forums for these open source projects to find answer to my problem, and bugs. I loved finding the answer to something I had a problem with, or the ability to actually edit the source to make the software work on my system. Also I am a fan of the libre part of the FOSS; being able to chose what features I want by either adding them myself or picking the fork that already has the feature I need, and it is not bloated with every feature possible in case a portion of the user base wants the feature (like commercial software–mainly the OS like Windows). I now want to give back to FOSS projects by contributing through this class; I have been looking forward to this, and I hope it is the learning experience that I want it to be.

From the blog WSU CS – Live and Code by dhimitraq and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS 401 First Post

This is my first post for CS 401 this semester!

I am very excited to be in this class and receive some on hands experience working with open source software. I personally am not too familiar with open source software apart from open office and I have never experienced what it is like to contribute to an open source project either. I do have a good amount of experience working in teams, but never entirely over the internet it will be very rewarding to see how real life large projects function with people contributing from all over. This seems like it will be my most interesting Computer Science course thus far and I hope that I can take what I learn from this course into my future career.

Go Pats!

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