[PL #13410] Private Planetlab Broken

[Mark Huang via RT]

Email Recipients (see http://www.planet-lab.org/Support)
       Owner: Nobody
       Requestor: jaffe at cs.huji.ac.il
       Ticket Ccs: jaffe at cs.huji.ac.il

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Jeff Sedayao via RT wrote:
> How soon will myplc be out (I ask having just ardously pulled in a
> pl_box set up through our firewall)?

It's mostly done. If you're feeling adventurous, you can try out the 
nightly myplc-* RPMs on the build server:

http://build.planet-lab.org/build/nightly/*/RPMS/i386/myplc-*

These RPMs are quite large; I haven't taken a stab at trimming it down yet.

You should be able to type "service plc start", then browse localhost. 
The default account is "root at test.planet-lab.org", with a password of 
"root". The primary configuration file is located in

/usr/share/plc/data2/etc/planetlab/plc_config.xml

Browse through it and try changing some variables (such as replacing 
localhost with the hostname of your Linux machine). When you change a 
variable, restart by typing "service plc restart". Eventually, we'll 
have a GUI that does this. A few variables are unsafe to change right 
now, or conflict with what you can change once you're logged in. You'll see.

Here's what's going under the covers when you type "service plc start":

/usr/share/plc/fc2.img is loopback mounted on /usr/share/plc/fc2
/usr/share/plc/data2 is bind mounted on /usr/share/plc/fc2/data
chroot /usr/share/plc/fc2
     service plc start (inside the chroot)
     - parses /etc/planetlab/plc_config.xml
     - rewrites all downstream configuration files (httpd.conf,
      postgresql.conf, etc.)
     - starts up all services (httpd, postgresql, crond, etc.)
     - rebuilds the Boot CD (http://.../download/) and
       Boot Manager (https://.../boot/) images

You should be able to to at least install and bring up a node with the 
custom Boot CD image, but slice creation doesn't quite work yet. It's 
almost there. Steve and I are working on that today.