[Planetlab-devel] questions abouting running an independent myplc

[Marc E. Fiuczynski]

Hello Sue,


On May 14, 2008, at 9:20 PM, Sue Moon wrote:
> - What versino of MyPLC should we run?
>    We have tried the f8/v4.2 (May 12) build-out.
>    We could not create a user nor a site.
>    What is the most reliable version at this point?

The web gui that is part of the MyPLC release currently does not  
include a web page to create sites.  Site creation is currently  
handled offline for the public PlanetLab, and for this reason there  
was a decision in the past to not include this in the current MyPLC  
web gui.  You can certainly create sites using the API.   I will  
bring this up with Reid (our resident web gui person) to see whether  
we should include a site creation page as part of the web gui release  
in MyPLC.

You should have been able to create a user given the default site.   
Again, if its not there you can do so via the API.

> - MyPLC user's guide seems to be out of date.
>   Any plan to update it soon?


Need to add this to our to do this.


> - Dynamic IP address support
>   We read somewhere that dynamic IP support is one of the
>   future to-do items.  Is there any progress on it?

Not sure what you mean by "dynamic IP" support?  We do support DHCP  
for nodes, but with the caveat that the IP address assigned to the  
node does not change.   If you want true dynamic ipaddrs, then there  
currently are (at least) three issues that require further work:

1) we don't have a dynDNS solution to automatically register and  
update a node's hostname<->ipaddr binding,

2) the registered ipaddr is currently a component that is part of the  
node key that is used to authenticate the node to MyPLC,

3) we currently do not dynamically update a slice's /etc/resolv.conf  
if dns servers are changed dynamically, and

4) ssh issues when the ipaddr changes.

The first three require some engineering presumably on both our  
BootManager and NodeManager (and ideally volunteers to do this).

> - In order to use a non-ethernet network interface,
>   what parts in the bootscript should be modified?

Good question.  I don't think we've ever done this.  Thierry @ OneLab  
used WiFi at one point.  Would need to dig deeper to figure this  
out.  Out of curiosity, what kind of device are you using?

Marc