Starting to build out a proto-system

I have a meeting with the person who can provide me with final hardware and lab space today. In the meantime, I am building the prototype system.

Let me talk about the basic setup.

Assumptions:

• Each test run requires two machines to run the actual tests.
• Each machine has an agent called Negatus on it.
• Large pool of these machines to run tests from.
• Those machines are controlled by a controlling agent called steeplechase. This runs on another machine.
• There needs to be a TURN server on some machine.
• There may need to be more VMs created to provide networking gateways/routing to simulate network conditions.
• There needs to be some kind of scheduler to run the tests. We are going to use Jenkins (http://jenkins-ci.org/). It's easy, and we should not run into its limitations.

So, I will setup the last one right now, the Jenkins machine.

At this point, I should point out that this is a large number of VMs for one desktop machine to host on VMWare Fusion. I may have to host some of them on a second machine.

Yesterday I built a Ubuntu 14.10 Desktop VM in VMWare Fusion. I use Desktop because I like having X-Windows. Everything else is easy to install. The initial specs:

• 4 cores
• 8192 RAM
• 100 GB RAM

Jenkins loves RAM. Well, it's a Java app, and all Java apps love RAM. Also, all logs and intermediate results from Jenkins processes end up being stored on the host, so the host needs some disk space. And giving this machine 4 cores allow one to administer the machine without shutting down Jenkins.

I then ran all of the software updates. And installed VMWare Tools. Which you need for the clock to work and to be able to copy-paste into apps.

It used to be that you had to install Java, which on Linux can be a pain, and setup your own script to run Jenkins, and setup your own startup script, etc. In the last couple of years, somebody smart made Jenkins an installable Debian package; details here: http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/debian/. If you are having trouble figuring out how to change /etc/apt/sources.list, see this page for info: http://askubuntu.com/questions/197564/how-do-i-add-a-line-to-my-etc-apt-sources-list.

At this point, Jenkins is running (see http://localhost:8080) to verify.

Tomorrow: Setting up signalingserver, steeplechase, negatus...