Research and Ideas during Server downtime

When Neo went down, it was difficult to determine what the next course of action would be since we need the cluster to get Eucalyptus running, and we need Eucalyptus running to actually use eutester. But in the meantime, we worked on several other small projects to get ourselves ready.

First of all, we moved all of our information from our PiratePad to the wiki so that others could start using our material more readily than before. We all made sure we understand the Python code fairly thoroughly as well. On the wiki, we posted info about eutester, getting the repository downloaded, some of the tutorials on Eucalyptus and Python, and even a very comprehensive API for the actual Python code in eutester.

Stephen and I set off to work on figuring out a few key concepts from the code that we are unsure about for this week. There are several code modules in eutester that look like they have to do with specific hardware/operating system instructions, but we want to find out what their jobs are, so we are doing the research this week/last week.

Additionally, we set other members of the team to the task of learning to handle Eucalyptus instances and trying to ssh into them, since we were all originally having problems doing this. Basically, we want people to be able to run their own Eucalyptus image and ssh into it so they can test on their own, or at the very least, just start learning the basics.

This leads into our final (and possibly most ambitious) “assignment” for ourselves this week. We would like to create a Linux kernel that is bundled with a working Eucalyptus image so that we can just upload this kernel whenever we want to test anything and we always know that it will be a working version and it will be compatible with our stuff. Another positive to this would be that since the Eucalyptus servers get wiped every 6 hours, we would already have the image of our personal kernel stored on a local machine and we could simple reupload when the servers get wiped. There is still much to be done before we can understand everything well enough to get to that point, but I think we are on the right track and our group has made very good progress so far in understanding everything they can.