[PL #13410] Private Planetlab Broken

[Thierry Parmentelat 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, kirk at cs.huji.ac.il

==================================================

Mark
I must have missed that one message of yours.. Thanks anyway for making 
this clear again

I am preparing for the adventure, so let me try to get this straight, 
please correct my assumptions if needed

- starting from a - fresh or not - fc2 install, I can setup my own plc 
by rpm-installing the latest nightly built myplc rpm
I still did not get exactly how/when the configuration is done, I've 
seen the xml/py/shell stuff in myplc but could not figure whether it's 
called by the rpm-install stage. No big deal. I take it the ability to 
provide several xml files will let us store our own tunings in a 
site-dependent xml, which sounds good.

- At this stage the boot CD and node installs all use the single 
PlanetLab tarball. Boot-time node updates will immediately return since 
the rpm repository is empty.

- I can start populating this rpm repo with my own stuff (and re-index 
repo); next node updates will use them right away. I take it the boot CD 
creation method is roughly unchanged as compared with what we have now.

- About hacking the bootmanager, again I assume the methods we've been 
using so far (overwriting python source code, refresh and sign 
bootmanager.sh) will keep on working..

- If I get you right, what you're saying is that if at that stage I 
update the myplc rpm from a more recent one, I will lose the changes I 
might have done under /plc/root, while the changes I did under /plc/data 
will be preserved. This is not too obvious from reading the code, I'd 
like you to confirm or infirm that point if you please.

Thanks !



Mark Huang via RT wrote:
> 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, kirk at cs.huji.ac.il
> 
> ==================================================
> 
> Thierry Parmentelat via RT wrote:
>> - once myplc is setup, how is it updated ? are the rmp-installs supposed 
>> to perform smooth update ?
> 
> I asked this question on the list a few weeks ago, and didn't receive 
> any opinions. So my idea, which hasn't been totally or safely 
> implemented yet, is that everything except /plc/data should be treated 
> as a monolithic binary. If you go poking around in /plc/root after it's 
> mounted, and upgrade things by hand, or replace binaries, or change the 
> scripts, that's your business.
> 
> With that said, I haven't settled on the set of files that should go in 
> /plc/data. You will probably have to poke around in /plc/root by hand to 
> fix things for at least the foreseeable future.
> 
> There is a place for upgrade paths in the startup sequence; carefully 
> writing and testing these paths is the next step in MyPLC development.
> 
>> - did you design a mechanism we can use for 'injecting' home-made rpms 
>> into this plc instance ? (basically, I need to (1) be able to use a 
>> local mirror of the PLC's rpms, for performance, and (2) manage my own 
>> set of custom rpms)
> 
> Nowadays, new nodes are installed from a monolithic tarball 
> PlanetLab-Bootstrap.tar.bz2, rather than being installed by yum. The 
> Bootstrap tarball is built from the RPMS of every release, so 
> maintaining a local mirror of PlanetLab RPMS is not strictly necessary 
> anymore.
> 
> Thus, MyPLC does *not* come with a local mirror of PlanetLab RPMS, only 
> a pre-built Bootstrap tarball. It does initialize an empty "planetlab" 
> repository. If you want to inject additional RPMS, place them in the 
> repository, edit the yumgroups.xml file, re-run yum-arch, and both new 
> and existing nodes should pick them up.
> 
> --Mark
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Devel-community mailing list
> Devel-community at lists.planet-lab.org
> https://lists.planet-lab.org/mailman/listinfo/devel-community