Category Archives: wsucs

Week of 9 April 2012

This week Brian, Nadia and I met and discussed the format in which we will deliver the Eucalyptus architecture overview that we are working on. Karl is getting us the contact information for whom to send it to. Untill then we will compile it into a regular text document. I am using Libre Office.

My part of the project is an overview of Walrus. Although the website is scarce on Walrus specifics, I have found a treasure trove of information in the Presentations & Publications section, specifically “Cluster Computing and the Grid”, Shanghai, China, 2009.

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Week of 2 April 2012

This was an event filled week. Our group leader, Brian, has decided that the glossary should be put on hold temporarily, so that we may more fully concentrate on our Eucalyptus Architecture overview.

We decided to approach the overview from the perspective of comparison to the similar AWS (Amazon Web Services). That being decided, I spent a lot of time flip-flopping between Amazon’s documentation of their S3 service, and the Eucalyptus information on Walrus.

Our group (Brian, Nadia, and I) have created a wiki fot this overview at

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

The model of Walrus is similar in many ways to the Amazon S3 service. Both store collections of objects in buckets. Both the Walrus component and S3 are accessed using a pair of ssh keys, one private and one public. Amazon, however, requires a 20 and 40 character string, respectively, while the Eucalyptus keys are much longer.

Once the user is authenticated, interaction can take place via a web interface or command line.

Documentation for Walrus on the Eucalyptus site is sketchy. We are to know that it is a service which must be registered and running running, and be allotted a hard drive partition. Other information on it needs to be extracted from the user forums.

This is one reason that we decided to approach it froam a comparison to the corresponding Amazon Web Services. Also, this glaring lack of documentation validates the reason we chose this project. There is a need, and the opportunity to do some useful work.

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Week of 26 March 2012

I worked a lot this week on the Eucalyptus Glossary that we are posting on the CS student wiki. I tried to concentrate on terms that I myself was fuzzy on. Most of these are networking terms. I have been able to muddle along in networking situations in my work, but so far have no formal training in it. I am taking a networking class next spring, and am so looking forward to it.

An example of this is the woord subnet. I have entered a “subnet mask” amny times, without really knowing why, only that a particular situation called for it. Installation and management of Eucalyptus requires a robust knowledge of networking, in order to enforce group policies, security, and communication. This has been a bit of a crash course for me in this area.
Terms added to the glossary this week:

Week of 5 March 2012

I spent quite a bit of time this week going over the Eucalyptus Installation Manual. See http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/EucalyptusInstallation_v2.0 . It is a 92 page document describing every detail of installing Eucalyptus, from dependencies, infrastructure, physical machines, etc. The aim of this is not only to gain a good understanding of the installation, but to gather terms for the glossary I am working on.

I am approaching the glossary in a twofold way: Firstly, I am reading through, and adding any term that I don’t have a full grasp on. This is very comprehensive, since the manual makes generous use of acronyms, (e.g. LDAP), which make more sense when they are spelled out.

I am also approaching it as would a complete novice to cloud computing. The user should have a foundation in I.T. terminology, such as TCPIP or virtual machine, while they may not be familiar with more in-depth terms such as VLAN trunking protocol.

From that prospective, it is a laborious process. I got through about 12 pages, and added over 20 new terms. Some definitions I am getting from the developers themselves, such as Amazon or imcp.org. Some sites however, add too much boasting about their wares, without adding to the users knowledge. In these cases I fell back on wikipedia.org.

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How to tell if a FLOSS project is doomed to FAIL – Eucalyptus

Below is my analysis of the Eucalyptus project, based on the criteria described in
http://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/How_to_tell_if_a_FLOSS_project_is_doomed_to_FAIL .

FAIL METER TOTAL
30
Although my rating technically puts the project into the “Babies cry when your code is downloaded” category, this is certainly a viable project. The fact that it is already a successful commercial enterprise makes this obvious. The tipping point is probably the size of the code, which is barley over the point criteria.
The areas where the project can use significant improvement are in the documentation. The existing documentation assumes a good deal of prior knowledge in Unix-based operating systems and version control systems (which is probably where we should focus our documentation efforts). This puts the software out of reach of the laymen user.
I’m sure this is why we were asked to help in the area of install documentation.

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Week of 27 Feb 2012: Documentation Project

Spent the day working on a glossary for Eucalyptus. Have the framework done, and several actual entries. Placed working copy at
http://cs.worcester.edu/wiki/index.php?n=DanAdams.Home

This was interesting because I had to pour over the Installation guide, and the Eucalyptus website. I also spent a lot of time on wikipedia. I tried to include terms in the glossary that I was fuzzy on, as well as those others might not be familiar with. There are also a few old chestnuts such as “TCP/IP’ and “Open Source Software” Overall, I think it is a pretty good start.

I started it out on an open office doc, and thought I could just copy & paste it onto a school wiki. No such luck! I then had to spend over an hour editing the content so it looks right.

A big job & a lot of work.

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Week of 27 Feb 2012: Freeciv

This was an interesting week. I began by working my way through Chapter 5: Building the Code

http://teachingopensource.org/index.php?title=Building_the_Code&oldid=3622

From Practical Open Source Software Exploration. I went through the steps of installing all the dependencies and configuring Freeciv. This is a FOSS role playing game inspired by the popular “Civilizations” MMP.

As predicted in the text, I ran into many problems not covered in the game documentation. I would get a build error, track it down, rebuild, and run into the next error. I found some good help on the forums at http://forum.freeciv.org/ .

The terminal command “./autogen.sh” would attempt to build the project. It would then take a while to build before you could tell if you had success or not. When at last I received no errors, I entered ‘make’ to compile the project.

This was a good confidence-building exercise. Normally, if a game took this much work to get it to run, I would quit & move on to something else.

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Week of 20 Feb 2012

We had Monday off, which meant no CS401 this week. I spent my free time going over the Eucalyptus wiki. In particular, I studied the Eucalyptus Administrator guide at http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/EucalyptusAdministratorGuide_v2.0

This covered much of the terminology, as well as how to install Eucalyptus fro source, and from binary packages. The latter option looks much easier. There are packages for all the major Linux/Unix-base operating systems.

Setting up all the prerequisites to make it run looks like a challenge, as Dave pointed out in class. There are Java and Perl dependencies, as well as specific network configurations that have to be followed. After that, the components must be registered, and the hypervisor must be configured.

When all this is done, it is recommended that you run some test VM’s before loading your own images.

This has been a fantastic education in cloud computing, as well as virtual machines. I set up Virtual box and loaded an Ubuntu ISO to get the feel for VM image files. I am looking forward to seeing the first VM running on the cluster

I look forward to seeing a

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“Git” on with it!

This week in class we installed, configured, and operated the git version control system. A version control system is an extremely useful tool on a software development project. It ensures that two or more people do no modify the same file at the same time. If this does happen, the software presents a conflict which can then be resolved.

Many prior versions can be backed up. It is easy to return to a previous version. The git commands are English friendly, and are similar to other console commands.

We downloaded a pair of security keys that git uses to authenticate users of a repository. We configured git to identify us with our name and email. We cloned an existing repository that Professor Wurst had set up for us. We then practiced editing files, checking status, and committing the files to the repository.

This was a good experience for me. The command line interface seems to make file transfer much faster. A great, unique feature of git is its branching model. Git will allow you to have multiple local branches that can be entirely independent of each other.

Once you have a Git repository, either one that you set up on your own server, or one hosted someplace, you can tell Git to either push any data that you have that is not in the remote repository up, or you can ask Git to fetch differences down from the other repo.

From the reading I have done, it appears that git is a superior VCS over others like Subversion, CVS, or Mercurial.

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We’ve Got a Project!

1/6/12
Today in class we were asked to choose an Open Source project that we will work on as a group this semester.

We were each assigned to research 2 projects last week and document it. It was an eye-opening experience. I especially liked the Democratic nature in which people are elected to be committers (At least on the projects I researched), and the way you have to work your way up.
I chose a FOSS music project, and an Appache Java project.

Alas, my choices were not Professor Wurst’s favorites, and did not make it onto the illustrious Whiteboard. What was, though, along with some other popular choices, was a project called Eucalyptus (http://open.eucalyptus.com/)
This is a project run by a colleague of Prof. Wurst’s.

From their website: “Eucalyptus enables the creation of on-premise private clouds”. This is the project we will ultimately run with. It seems to have great opportunities to learn more about networking, operating systems, and coding. I am looking forward to digging into this.

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