On Thursday, the 19th, Eucalyptus developer Andy Grimm paid WSU a visit. Other students and I ate lunch with him and our department chair Karl Wurst. Our lunch bill is being paid by Red Hat, so even if I never work there and get a pay check from them, I can at least say that I had lunch on them one time. π
After lunch, Andy and I spent the next 3 hours trying to resolve the various issues that were keeping our cloud from functioning properly. The good news is that I learned a lot about how Eucalyptus works, networking, and some neat command line tricks. The bad news is that our cloud is still not functioning.
As I pointed out in my last post: networking is hard. It is especially hard when working on the university network whose topology is pretty much unknown to me. The first big mistake that I made when I set up the network for the cloud was split the LAN into 2 subnets. The CLC, SC, and CC were on one subnet, while all the NCs were on their own subnet and the CC acted as a router for them. I had misread some networking documentation and mistakenly thought that having the NCs are on their own subnet would make things easier for later on. Andy set me straight about that and I “flattened” the network out so all of the NCs are now on the same subnet as the other Eucalyptus components. Next, we set up ethernet bridges for virtual networks that will be needed for the virtual machines. That was mostly straightforward but through some slight misconfiguration I encountered Red Hat networking hell involving a renamed `eth0` which Andy resolved for me by messing with udev.
I thought that I had a recent enough kernel installed on all of the machines to avoid the kernel bug that breaks Walrus. Turns out I didn’t. So no matter what we did the cloud would never function until that was resolved. A `yum update kernel` and a reboot took care of that. Then, for some strange reason, PostgreSQL processes wouldn’t start. Andy started them manually and things seemed to work just fine for subsequent reboots.
Despite fixing all of these issues and making a ton of progress in such a short time, we were still unable to run a VM instance. Andy and I ran out of time (he had a train to catch and I had to return to work) but he suggested that I essentially start over once again. This time I will be using the Eucalyptus packages that are available from the Eucalyptus repository.
So, another week goes by without a working cloud… but I learned a lot. Many thanks to Andy Grimm for making me a better system administrator.
From the blog David Thompson Β» WSU CS by davexunit and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.