Re: GNOME hosting - update

[Iago Toral Quiroga <itoral igalia com>]

El lun, 23-04-2007 a las 17:46 +0200, Olav Vitters escribió:
> I promised a while ago to move the buildbot to one of the GNOME servers.
> 
> We have an 2x Opteron 252 with 4GB mem, 32GB of disk (SCSI) intended
> solely for the buildbot. Currently named tinderbox1, but I'll have that
> changed. The free disk space is pretty limited, but it should be enough
> for a stable and unstable build.
> 
> How is such a buildbot setup? Are there any changes other than just
> the buildbot software? Some quick instructions perhaps? Suggest to meet
> on IRC to set up the software.
> 
> FYI: Currently the machine has the most minimal install of RHEL5
> possible. Meaning, after installation the machine didn't even have
> ssh/yum/etc. So probably a few -devel things have to be installed on it
> (probably lacks gcc).


Hi Olav,

that's great news! 

Currently the buildbot setup has two parts, the "master" and the
"slaves". The master is the server were the builds are instructed and
the results collected to be shown to the final users, the slaves are the
servers were the actual builds are done, so we'd have one master and
1..N slaves, each slave building Gnome in a different
Architecture/SO/Configuration/whatever.

Users would access the master server, like the one we are currently
hosting here:
http://buildbot-gnome.igalia.com/
while slaves would remain anonymous to the users. 

At this moment we have just a single slave building Gnome in Debian Sid
(which is hosted in the same server as the master), but thomasvs is
working on adding two more slaves running different versions of Fedora.

Thus, our idea would be to move the master to the Gnome server and allow
interested contributors to offer slaves that we can plug to the master.
for example, here at Igalia we would maintain the Debian Sid slave.

Some issues to have into account:

   - Each module in a gnome moduleset that's being built in the
gnome-buildbot needs a port to communicate the master and the slave
process building that module in the slave machine. That means we would
need to open ~150 ports in the master for each slave machine we want to
plug. Would this be a problem?

   - The master setup is not very easy at this moment :(, I know the
steps that need to be done and I can write a guide but maybe it's easier
if I do it myself or I help you in the process. What do you think? Maybe
I can write the steps and send them to you so you can take a look and
tell me what you think about the process.

   - Maintenance: we would like to improve the gnome buildbot adding new
features, etc. How would the update process be if the master is hosted
in a Gnome machine? Would there be any restrictions or something? Would
we have root access to the server? 

That's all I can think of right now, if something else comes to my mind
I let you know :). 

Btw, about the software, I think that in order to run the master we
would not need a lot of stuff, as the build process is not done there
but in the slaves.

Tell us what you think about this, please. If I haven't been clear
enough about something or you need further information (probably the
case), let me know :)

Anyway I'll try to prepare a guide for the master installation this
week, so you can take a look at the steps.

... and thanks again for you offer! :)

dape, thomasvs, any comments on this?

Iago