Category Archives: WSU CS

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 They were out of date and did not allow the use of virtualization, so we had to update the BIOS a certain way with the DELL Executable that was the only way to update the BIOS was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.

Feedback to the Euca2ools User Guide

In an earlier post, I said that I felt we had succeeded in making a clear and understandable user guide for Euca2ools. While I still feel that this is the case, we got some useful criticism of the guide from the last group to present on Wednesday. This group was tasked with trying to use Euca2ools and Eutester by only following the guides on our wiki, and then to report their findings and suggestions. They told us that while the guide overall was well-made, there were two areas that were difficult to follow.

The first issue was finding the user credentials when setting up Euca2ools. I admit to having trouble with this as well at first, but it did not even cross my mind to put instructions into the guide on how to find your credentials. Oh well, that is why having other people critique your work is good! I edited the wiki to fix this problem.

The second issue was about getting a working SSH connection. This is the biggest weakness of the guide. Getting SSH to work consistently never happened for us. We have several theories on why it failed so often. We suspect  as dynamic IPs could be the culprit. I do not have any solutions currently better than what is already posted in the guide, so it will stay as it is for now. Perhaps a future class will be able to fix up that part of the guide for us.

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

Eucalyptus Presentations

On Wednesday, all of the groups presented on what they had accomplished during the semester. I did not realize how much work we actually got done as an entire class until I saw the presentations. There were 7 presentations in all:

  1. Eutester Issues
  2. Cloud Overview
  3. Eutester Documentation
  4. Infrastructure
  5. Leveraging Python for Eutester
  6. Using Euca200ls (my group)
  7. Installing Euca2ools and Eutester

The first group gave an overview of the open and closed issues on Github. The second group gave a very detailed overview of the ideas behind cloud computing and defined many general and Eucalyptus-specific terms. The third group described the process of attempting to document the Eutester code. Dave and Mike, the infrastructure group, had an entertaining discussion about how much frustration went into setting up a working Eucalyptus cloud. The fifth group went into depth about using Python with Eutester. My group described the main functions of Euca2ools and the process of creating a user-friendly guide on our wiki. We actually succeeded in demonstrating a working SSH connection to an instance created from an image that I uploaded to our Eucalyptus cloud, which I consider to be a big accomplishment! The final group critiqued the experience of attempting to get several modules up and running, specifically Euca2ools and Eutester, just by following the wiki guides that we had all created.

It was very interesting to see the other groups present, especially the groups involved with Eutester. Spending most of my time with Euca2ools, I did not look into Eutester very much at all. Seeing all of my classmates describe their experiences with it was great to see.

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

Final Thoughts about CS401/Eucalyptus

I had a lot of fun working in this class it was definitely a difference experience than almost all my CS courses before hand.   I liked working on a big project my only request for the future is to see more code but, something that was really unavoidable for a beta-test style class that we had.  I know it wasn’t anyone’s fault just too many problems with the cluster to really get into it.  Just because we didn’t get coding done doesn’t mean I didn’t learn quite a bit about how exactly working on a big project was like.  Learning to use git, irc, and being on a list server were pretty new experiences for me, aside from gaming I had never used irc, git seems to be invaluable to know since every employer I’ve talked to seemed excited that I already know it.

 

Main thing I’ll take away from the course is exactly what cloud computing is, all the nomenclature we’ve learned, how to work on large scale projects, how to communicate with a large group of people from different time zones and different backgrounds in programming/computer science.

 

Final presentations today were great, seemed like every group found a lot of different topics to talk about and cover and they all seemed to master their specific topic.

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

Final Wiki Adjustments

I never got around to putting up this blog post last week but I figure it’s worth posting.

 

After siting down with Chris while he worked his way through our wiki was great, really gave me a chance to see how a wiki flows through another set of eyes.  Luckily we’ve all been doing a great job of working with the wiki adding the needed information and adding it coherently.  Only issues really were fixing formatting adding things like, “don’t forget to use sudo” to the top of commands rather than after.  Only “big” changes I made to the wiki was adding a bit on git and how to install python user a package manager.

 

I enjoyed working with Chris getting his input, I think it was smart to do it on my own first, since I knew a bit on how to get everything running from doing it a few times, then having him go through.  Since I never posted this Karl mentioned that there is a whole field of engineering in something like that, actually testing your code/wiki/idea on an audience and jotting down notes.

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

Week 14: Last week of the class

This is the last blog for the class CS 401.  This semester has being a good one because of what I have done and of what I have learned.  I have learned a lot from research about FOSS Field Trip 1 and FOSS Field Trip 2. I was not familiar with Open Source projects but [&hellip

From the blog E. Lekdushi CS401 by elekdushi and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Evaluation of the Euca2ools User Guide

Most of my work this semester has been experimenting with Euca2ools and modifying our User Guide to reflect my findings. My primary goal in collaborating on this User Guide was to make it easy to follow, especially for a Linux novice such as myself. Ultimately, I think we achieved our goal. My group partners are definitely the experts and filled the guide with very useful information on how to perform the various tasks. I took their knowledge and formatted it, expanded on it, and tried to explain as best I could what each command was doing. A lot of trial and error went into this, as a lot of the time I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing. A positive side-effect: fumbling through Euca2ools and revising this guide over the semester did help me a lot with my knowledge of Linux.

I wanted someone who was completely new to Euca2ools to be able to successfully do something productive by only following our guide. I think we came pretty close. Now that the semester is at an end, the guide is as finished as it will be until perhaps a future CS class takes over on the same project. It definitely is not 100% done. Eucalyptus is a huge project and Euca2ools is a major part of it. There is always more that we could do in writing the user guide, but I am happy with the progress we made.

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

Success!

Today is a big day in working with Euca2ools on our cloud. I have successfully uploaded an image, kernel, and ramdisk to the Matrix server and an instance is actually running off of my image. This has been a trial and error process that has taken weeks, and I am pretty satisfied. Here is the proof:

The instructions posted on our user guide by Dhimitri and Mindo were really helpful, but of course being a complete noob to Linux I was confused by some parts. The wiki will be changing slightly to reflect my new found understanding and hopefully the revisions will help anyone else trying out this process in the future.

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

Week 13: Finally I did install EuTester

After so many unsuccessful tries to install EuTester on same operating system but on two different kind versions “Ubuntu 10.04” and “Ubuntu 11.10”. At one point I did think that might be some kind of issue from an update of the EuTester code. I did think this way because some of my classmates had EuTester [&hellip

From the blog E. Lekdushi CS401 by elekdushi and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Last weeks of the semester…

The end of the semester has approached rapidly and is finally here. Although we do not have a completely working cluster on campus we have spent a lot of time working with EuTester using the ECC cloud and getting familiar with how it works. I personally only got as far as running test scripts in EuTester, the learning curve was quite steep and I had never used so many command line prompts prior to this class. The documentation for setting up and installing EuTester is decent for a more experienced user, but for someone who had never done work like this i, it was a little difficult to configure with the documentation given. I think that it would be a great idea for us to contribute some additional documentation to what already exists for EuTester, especially documentation for a less experienced user.

We have also been given two assignments which I am currently working on for our last day of class/final. One is an ethical analysis of the Eucalyptus project and the other a final presentation for each groups experiences with the project. My groups focus was EuTester issues and bugs, however most of our group only just started to run test scripts by the end of the semester because we all experienced many issues configuring EuTester. So we were unable to dive into the issues/bugs that were listed on the github site. Our presentation will probably focus more on the installation and configuration of EuTester and the troubles we experienced setting it up and what we learned.

I really enjoyed the opportunity to do something like this with our class and wished we could have gotten closer to actually have a fully working cluster on campus. If only the class lasted over multiple semesters or had a lab attached to it we may have gotten further. The project itself is very time consuming and complicated so I am happy with how far we got on just 1 semester. Hopefully following classes can pick up where we left off and continue to work on the same project.

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