Zach Shepherd's WordPress Blog

Regrettably it was another low-progress semester for Benchvm. I haven’t abandoned it, but have been rather busy.

The subversion server is still up and running. There have been several repositories and acconts created. Nightly backups (incremental on Monday-Saturday and complete on Sunday) have been added.

One of my goals for this semester was to help setup and document the new production servers. There was poor communication prior to work being done; the Xeon machines were set once, but had problems with software RAID and then they were set up again, but then there was a discussion about whether we knew enough about CentOS. The storage machines were set up using OpenSolaris, but then there was a discussion about whether we knew enough about using that. Mirror was set up, and used briefly, but then we reverted back to the old system for various reasons.

Overall, it was a learning experience, but not a productive one. The machines are assembled physically, which was useful, but a relatively small task. A little was learned about OpenSolaris and ZFS and a little was learned about software RAID, but, as of now, we still aren’t any closer to reaching a decision on how we’re going to set up the system and we still have a lot of work to do.

Goals for the semester (in no particular order):

• Keep COSI Coding Sessions running while Jacob is away, help revive COSI Workdays, and help at open house
• Produce a usable version of Benchvm
• Get the new production servers running and documented
• Find a fun project to work on
• Keep docs up to date (software and content wise)
• Maintain svn (in terms of backups and software)

Progress so far:

• As part of a workday a few weekends ago Ryan, Justin, and I assembled what could be assembled of the new dual-xeon production servers. One of the motherboards and another one of the hard drives were DOA, so we’re in the process of RMAing those.
• Coding Sessions have been poorly attended, but have been held Tuesdays and Thursdays.
• I presented on Version Control Using Subversion on January 21. (Materials available at http://docs.cslabs.clarkson.edu/wiki/Presentations/Spring 2009)
• Docs has been updated with most of what has happened this semester (minutes, projects, etc.)

Add “store-passwords = no” and “store-auth-creds = no” to the [auth] section of ~/.subversion/config.

Results: Subversion will never cache passwords (which are stored in plain text) or credentials

More information: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.serverconfig.netmodel.html#svn.serverconfig.netmodel.credcache

After reading Kyle Smith’s post about solutions logs, I decided to create a new category for my blog just for solutions logs. If posts in this category seem to be overwhelming, I can look into removing them from the main page and the feed used on planet.cosi.

Below are some highlights of what I learned this semester.

• Through Projects
  • Autoguilt
    • More about how to use Drupal as a development platform
  • Benchvm
    • A lot about how procrastination prevents any work from getting done
  • Management
    • How to control Xen programatically
    • About how to use ssh keys, bash scripts, and php to automate tasks
  • SVN
    • How to set up a subversion server
    • A lot more about the inner workings of subversion
• Through Presentations
  • Xen Workshops
    • The different Xen networking configurations and how to use them
    • How to run PV Xen in a Xen HVM guest
  • Web Development Presentations
    • Various things about how teaching web development is different than teaching web design
  • Server Hardware Presentation
    • About various technologies that we’re considering using for production with the new hardware

For more information on what I’ve learned, check out my changes on the wiki.

I gave three presentations, two workshops on Xen, and several lightning talks this semester. Information about each can be found on the presentations page of the wiki.

IBM has a neat contest going on; there are five categories:Video, Gadget, Query, Porting and XML. It looks fairly straight forward. If anyone is interested in working together on either of the last two (the only team options), let me know!

See http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/12/01/ibms-xml-challenge-lots-of-prizes-inside/ for more information.