Category Archives: WSU CS

Week of troubles

This week our groups were supposed to continue working on our assignments. I am in the EUTester group, and I one of my tasks was to try and get a connection to a test instance of an image, however do to issues with my virtual machine, I didn’t get as much done as I had hopped to. I was able to compile the source code, but I didn’t get a connection to ECC to test anything yet.

This week now that I have all of the issues with my laptop straightened out, I hope to be able to actually get something working with this. I’m still not sure how useful an instance of an image on ECC will be, and I think that our cluster will be the best way to test it. From what I’ve read on our mailing list though, it seems like there have been issues on that front as well with KVM not supporting our setup. So hopefully this week brings more success than the past week for everyone!

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

More Installation Work

This week was a bit more product for myself. The installation of eucalyptus seems to be coming along nicely and should be complete very soon! Due to some technical difficulties with our CLC Neo, we had to make some minor changes to our cluster network map and use Morpheus as a replacement(at least for the time being).

I was able to help out the installation process by doing some work on one of the nodes, “dozer.” Firstly, I had to copy the installation over to the node from Morpheus. This would have been a much easier task if we had realised that root login wasn’t enabled on the dozer node. After figuring that out, the install was copied over just fine.

From that point I downloaded and installed all of the dependencies for eucalyptus, which were a few repositories and quite an extensive list of packages. Once these were on the node, I created a eucalyptus user since the software expects one,  registered eucalyptus-cloud, -cc, and -nc startup scripts so that the “service” command will work for them, and initialised postgreSQL. All of the system commands that I used for this were provided by Dave’s documentation on the wiki.

Once we determine that the installation on Dozer worked as intended, I will go through the rest of the nodes and complete the installation on those as well. For now we will wait to see if it was done correctly before proceeding with the other nodes so we do not have to fix mistakes on five machines instead of one or two.

I plan on making a more detailed and accurate network map for our cluster. That should come in handy when identifying each individual server in the cluster and knowing what they actually do.However, I’m waiting to see what we decide to do with Neo before I do this. Other than that, hopefully we will have the cluster installation up and running this coming week. That’s assuming we don’t run into any more serious setbacks(like our CLC overheating).

 

From the blog clacroix12 by clacroix12 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS 401 – Tons of Progress… And Yet Another Roadblock

I’ll start with the bad news. On Sunday, March 4th, I tried to SSH into the CLC from home to try to get some more work done. I was greeted with a timeout. Neo, the CLC, was down. It turns out that the CPU fan was dead and the system overheated. We have 8 machines and it was just my luck that the CLC machine had the bad fan. So, either permanently or temporarily, I’m going to be using Morpheus as the CLC. Luckily, I had already rsync’d the Eucalyptus binaries to a few other servers so I could easily continue my work.

As an initial test, I’m using 3 of our servers to make a minimal working configuration. There are a lot of things that have to be done to each machine such as adding repositories, downloading dependencies, initializing PostgreSQL, and finally initializing Eucalyptus. There are 3 init scripts that Eucalyptus provides: eucalyptus-cloud, eucalyptus-cc, and eucalyptus-nc. Walrus, CLC, and SC require eucalyptus-cloud to be running. CC require eucalyptus-cc. Each node requires the eucalyptus-nc service. On the CLC machine, I registered it to be used for Walrus and the SC. We have another server, named Trinity, being used for the CC that needs to be registered with the CLC.

Now that the CLC and CC were operational, it was time to start up a node. This is where I ran into even more trouble. The computers we’re using as servers are older machines with CPUs that do not support hardware virtualization. With the release of RHEL 6, KVM is the supported hypervisor for virtualization. Unfortunately, KVM requires hardware virtualization support in order to function so it is not a possible option for us to use. The Xen hypervisor, on the other hand, doesn’t need to have hardware virtualization in order to function. The problem is that support for it was dropped in RHEL 6 so it is not so trivial to install now. The Xen wiki has a tutorial about installing Xen on a RHEL 6 system, which is quite long. I am slowly working through this tutorial to build the Xen packages that I need. It is an unfortunate situation because it is a very time consuming process. I was really hoping to have this system functional by today so I am a bit disappointed that I once again failed to meet my goals.

To end on a positive note, I am starting to become familiar with the Eucalyptus software. The more I start/restart the services and register/deregister components, the less confused I become about how the Eucalyptus system functions. I have written quite lengthy documentation on the CS401 wiki about all of my progress that another classmate has been using to help setup other machines that will later be used as nodes.

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

Week of March 5th 2012

This week I’ve been working on documentation for an overview on cloud computing in it’s general sense. I’ve been doing research and gathering information about cloud computing and it’s various aspects and traits. I was able to find lots of information about the pros and cons of cloud computing. I also found out a lot about how cloud computing has affecting the business world in positive ways and the manners in which it has provided cost savings. It has also provided a means for people to collaborate on projects without them needing to be in the same room or even the same country for that matter. I also found great information about the different styles and types of clouds. Clouds can be public, private or hybrid. They can also be serviced in different forms (i.e. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS). I’ve learned more than I knew before about cloud computing so it’s been an interesting week of research and documentation. I also read Chapters 1-3 on http://www.theopensourceway.org/book/The_Open_Source_Way and Chapter 6 in http://quaid.fedorapeople.org/TOS/Practical_Open_Source_Software_Exploration/html/ch-Debugging_the_Code.html. These readings were also very informative and I learned a lot from them. The information about Bug Trackers was most helpful to me. I was not completely familiar with that aspect of FOSS projects so I found that to be helpful in many ways.

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

Week 6 Getting eutester to work

This is a trial and error process, with a strong emphasis on error.  I’ve never used Python before, so I find myself jumping to Google search quite a bit.  Anyway, the first problem I encountered was starting a Python terminal, which turns out to be as easy as typing Python into an open terminal.  You’ll see ‘>>>’ to indicate Python is available.  The next problem was that I had not built Eutester correctly, turns out I needed to give root permission to do this.  Finally, I had a working version of Eutester and a Python terminal, but when I tried to run the command ‘from eucaops import Eucaops’ I got an error which seemed to indicate that Boto (the Python interface to EC2) is not working.

It seems I cannot create a connection to the Eucalyptus cloud.  I’ll edit this post after I figure out what’s happening.

Well, it seems there is a problem on the server end.  I talked with someone on #eucalyptus and created a forum post.  Hopefully this issue gets resolved quickly.

Images are again available, and I am resuming my quest to get Eutester to work for me.  My first roadblock this morning is that when trying to import eucaops I get an error telling me that a paticular class cannot be imported (BlockDeviceType).  A quick search of the file shows that this class was renamed to EBSBlockDeviceType. This error was caused by the simple fact that my version of Boto was out-of-date.  I downloaded and installed the latest version(Boto 2.2.2).

The next problem encountered has to do with credentials.  Essentially I need a credentials directory which contains a eucarc file from which key information can be extracted.  I resolved this be finding my eucarc file and copy pasting the path name.  I have been able to follow the the test listed here up until the ping test.  Despite several tries to authorize the group – default – I am unable to ping the instance.

This assignment has been frustrating, to say the least, but I feel I have a much better understanding of the process involved.  I will be updating the Wiki soon, so hopefully anyone else will be able to get eutester running in short order.

From the blog sflynn1976 » wsu-cs by sflynn1976 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Connecting to an ECC Cloud

After finally familiarizing myself with the Eucalyptus documentation I decided to attempt to connect and establish a VM on the ECC cloud. In order to successfully use EuTester and become familiar with testing clouds I need to be able to actually connect to a working cloud.

This process was a bit daunting at first when I started receiving errors immediately from the start. After much research and a little figuring out of my own I was able to begin connecting to an instance. The problem I had initially was that the directory I had created did not contain the .zip file with my credentials from the ECC site. After putting this .zip file in the same directory and properly extracting them I was able to connect to an instance.

Image

However, the next problem would come shortly after. After connecting to the instance I authorized the security groups and allocated the IPs according to the documentation on the Eucalyptus site. This is where the problems started as I attempted to SSH into a VM instance. I keep receiving connection timeout errors as follows:

Image

I will keep researching this issue and speak to a few people from class tomorrow to see if anyone has experienced the same problem.

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

CS 401 – Does Eucalyptus Fail?

My homework assignment (besides continuing my ongoing struggle with installing Eucalyptus) was to take a look at Tom “Spot” Callaway‘s “How to tell if a FLOSS project is doomed to FAIL” and see how many points of fail that the Eucalyptus project has. I had the pleasure of meeting Spot and hearing him give this talk at Western New England College and it was very entertaining.

Now, how badly does Eucalyptus fail? By my calculations they had 55 points of fail which means that “Babies cry when your code is downloaded”. I think I may have been a bit too rough with my analysis. I really do like the Eucalyptus project, but as a new user that is also completely new to the cloud computing concept, it’s hard to figure out exactly what to do and how to do it. There is documentation but there is not enough of it. From my understanding the Eucalyptus team acknowledges that and one of our goals this semester is to improve documentation for users, and who better to write documentation for new users than… new users!

In addition to the documentation fails (I forgive you, Eucalyptus devs, I hate writing documentation as well 😉, as far as I can tell there are no unit tests for the source code to check for bugs that may have creeped in. That alone earned Eucalyptus +25 points of fail and pushed the project into the crying babies category.

Once again, from what I have seen, the Eucalyptus project is great. Their developers have been supportive and responsive when I’ve had issues. As a FOSS advocate, the freedom of using a free and open source cloud computing platform far outweighs the convenience of a proprietary system that is easier for newcomers. Eucalyptus is much more win than fail, and I hope that my class can help the developers improve the usability of the software.

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

Problems and Progress

We are about halfway through the semester and it seems like things are moving kind of slowly. I have to admit that I did not get much done this week even though I set some fairly ambitious goals last week. I read up on some more of the Eucalyptus and eutester packages and I really don’t understand all of it. Also, Neo went down this week, leaving Morpheus as the head node in our cluster. This is a pretty decent set back for the class because we need to get euca2ools set up on either Neo or Morpheus (not entirely sure if it matters which one yet) in order to begin running instances of Eucalyptus and testing it using eutester. There is not much we can use eutester for in the meantime, though I and several of my group mates have been brushing up on our Python skills lately to make sure we understand the code thoroughly. This way we will be ready to start testing and writing code as soon as everything is up and running properly. This week I plan to do a little more research and keep an eye out for Neo so that I can get on and install euca2ools (if it is not already set up). Hopefully this week will be a little more productive on my end and a little less harmful for our server…

From the blog trevorhodde by Trevor and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Version Control

This week I did a lot of reading on traditional version control systems (VCS) versus distributed version control systems (DVCS). Both sides of the aisle had good arguments for and against one another, but in my humble opinion DVCS is the way to go. It seems to me that the benefits of having a distributed code base outweigh the negatives of potential security issues. As long as everyone on the project is a semi-competent computer user there should be no problems with security.

I did, however, recently discover that not only was there a hack exploited against GitHub; the guys over at GitHub seem to have dismissed it completely without trying to patch the hole. My understanding is that the exploit uses Rails and requires the code base to be locked in order to work. Still, it is something that merits a patch.

I apologize for the scattered nature of this post and the shortness as well, I’ve been heavily medicated the last two days after a medical procedure. My next post will have more substantial content and coherent flow, I promise.

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.

Making Progress

Personally, this was a slow week for myself. In class we discussed all of the topics for eucalyptus that we needed to get people working on. We arranged the topics, and with the help of etherpad, had people “sign up” for whatever area of eucalyptus they wanted to work on. I chose to be a part of the eucalyptus install team with Dave and Mike. The  networking aspect of things tends to interest me a great deal so I wish to work on that skill as much as I can.

I communicated a little bit with Dave throughout the week, and according to the massive amount of documentation he wrote up, it seems like he is making a lot of progress. As far as my end on the install however, I wasn’t able to get much work done this week. I did take a more in depth look at the user and administrator documentation on the eucalyptus website so I would have a better idea as to what was ahead of us. This coming week I plan on getting a lot more work done on the installs, namely getting some of the node controllers working. We are aiming to have this thing up and running as soon as possible!

From the blog clacroix12 by clacroix12 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.