Testbed Update Plan
Planning the update of the middleware/development test bed
There is a number of tasks involved in bringing the testbed to where we like to be. We also need to agree on a timeframe in which we like to see these things accomplished.
inventory of current services
This section should list the current services we run and use on the testbeds. For each service, we should explain what we should like to do with it (keep, drop, change?).
| Service | System | keep/move/lose | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| LDAP | span | lose | to be discontinued after migration to central LDAP |
| DHCP | span | move | by dnsmasq, /etc/hosts and /etc/ethers. Should migrate elsewhere |
| DHCP | bleek | keep | bleek is going to be the main home directory and DHCP server, after it's been upgraded. |
| Cruisecontrol | bleek | move | build system for VL-e and BiG Grid; may move to Hudson. Currently transferred to cruisecontrol.testbed |
| Hudson | kudde | move | continuous integration, currently for jGridstart but could serve others |
| Home directories | everywhere | move | should be merged onto single NFS server |
| X509 host keys and pre-generated SSH keys | span | move | all in /var/local/hostkeys |
| Robot certificate (etoken) | kudde | keep/move | hardware token is plugged into kudde to generate vlemed robot certificates using cronjob + software in /root/etoken. Token can be moved to another machine but it should remain within the P4CTB |
| VMWare Server 1.0 | bleek | move | If bleek is destined to be home directory server, VMWare should be put on other hardware. |
VMWare on bleek.nikhef.nl
The following machines are all candidate for being scrapped, unless serious objections arise.
drwxr-xr-x 2 dennisvd users 4096 Feb 5 2007 ./poc_test_centos3 drwxr-xr-x 2 dennisvd users 4096 Mar 30 2007 ./CentOS 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 dennisvd users 4096 Apr 10 2007 ./centos3-server drwxr-xr-x 2 dennisvd users 4096 Jun 5 2008 ./Debian Sid drwxrwxr-x 2 dennisvd users 4096 Oct 21 2008 ./poc1 drwxr-xr-x 2 dennisvd users 4096 Oct 21 2008 ./Debian Etch 4.0r0 drwxr-xr-x 2 dennisvd users 4096 Oct 21 2008 ./debian 4 minimal drwxr-xr-x 2 dennisvd users 4096 Oct 21 2008 ./scientific linux 4 drwxr-xr-x 2 dennisvd users 4096 Oct 21 2008 ./CentOS4-Server-i386 drwxr-xr-x 2 dennisvd users 4096 Oct 21 2008 ./CentOS3-i386 drwxr-xr-x 2 dennisvd users 4096 Oct 21 2008 ./tinyCentOS3 drwxr-xr-x 2 msalle users 4096 Jun 10 10:33 ./debian4-64 drwxrwxr-x 2 dennisvd users 4096 Jun 10 10:33 ./vle-poc-r3 drwxr-xr-x 2 janjust users 4096 Sep 28 16:20 ./debian5-64 (saved for Mischa) drwxr-xr-x 2 dennisvd users 4096 Oct 27 18:20 ./cruisecontrol_centos4_i386 (CC no longer uses this) drwxr-xr-x 2 dennisvd users 8192 Oct 28 15:07 ./cruisecontrol_centos4_x86_64 (CC no longer uses this) drwxrwxr-x 2 dennisvd users 4096 Nov 11 11:49 ./ren.nikhef.nl (used by WicoM, can be scrapped)
Besides these, a couple of zip files exists which are packed versions of virtual machine images. These will also disappear unless someone wants to take them home for nostalgic reasons.
-rw-r--r-- 1 dennisvd users 232361772 Aug 1 2007 debian-4-minimal.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 430972968 Aug 1 2007 gforge-4.5.15-fc3.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 654212858 Aug 1 2007 lcg27ui.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 203298842 Aug 1 2007 tinyCentOS-3.8.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 197921825 Aug 1 2007 tinyCentOS.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 1249781095 Aug 1 2007 vle-poc-r1-build003.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 1259094081 Aug 1 2007 vle-poc-r1-build004.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 1310361793 Aug 1 2007 vle-poc-r1-build005.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 1341440768 Aug 1 2007 vle-poc-r2-build001.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 dennisvd users 647782099 Aug 30 2007 minimal-sl4-apt.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 803171882 Sep 18 2007 CentOS-3.9-glite-3.0.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 1386416706 Sep 18 2007 vle-poc-r2-build002.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 1394177060 Sep 21 2007 tutorial07.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 659597940 Oct 21 2008 centos4.7-i386.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 1536737886 Oct 22 2008 vle-poc-r3-build001.zip (scrap) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 1541972232 Oct 22 2008 tutorial08.zip (save, but I already have backup) -rw-r--r-- 1 janjust users 941597293 Nov 11 2008 centos4.7-glite-3.1-wn-i386.zip (scrap)
Data plan for precious data
Precious means anything that took effort to put together, but nothing that lives in version control elsewhere. Think home directories, system configurations, pre-generated ssh host keys, X509 host certs, etc.
One idea is to put all of this on a box that is not involved in regular experimentation and messing about, and have backup arranged from this box to Sara with ADSM (which is the current service running on bleek). After this is arranged we begin to migrate precious data from all the other machines here, leaving the boxen in a state that we don't get sweaty palms over scratching and reinstalling them.
Hardware inventory
Perhaps this should be done first. Knowing what hardware we have is prerequisite to making sensible choices about what we try to run where.
Changes here should probably also go to NDPF System Functions.
| name | ipmi name* | type | chipset | #cores | mem | OS | disk | service tag | remarks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| bleek | bleek | PE1950 | Intel 5150 @2.66GHz | 4 | 8GB | CentOS4-64 | software raid1 2×500GB disks | CQ9NK2J | High Availability, dual power supply; precious data; backed up |
| toom.testbed | toom | PE1950 | Intel E5440 @2.83GHz | 8 | 16GB | CentOS5-64 | Hardware raid1 2×715GB disks | DC8QG3J | current Xen 3 hypervisor with mktestbed scripts |
| kudde | kudde | PE1950 | Intel E5440 @2.83GHz | 8 | 16GB | CentOS5-64 | Hardware raid1 2×715GB disks | CC8QG3J | Contains hardware token/robot proxy for vlemed; current Xen 3 hypervisor with mktestbed scripts |
| span | span | PE2950 | Intel E5440 @2.83GHz | 8 | 24GB | CentOS5-64 | Hardware raid10 on 4×470GB disks (950GB net) | FP1BL3J | DHCP,DNS,NFS,LDAP; home dirs must be moved to bleek; current Xen 3 hypervisor with mktestbed scripts |
| melkbus | hals | PEM600 | Intel E5450 @3.00GHz | 8 | 32GB | CentOS5-64 | 2x 320GB SAS disks | 76T974J | to be renamed to hals; Oscar's private machine? |
| put.testbed | put | PE2950 | HMXP93J | former garitxako;FreeNAS | |||||
| blade14.testbed | bl0-14 | PEM610 | Intel E5504 @2.00GHz | 2x4 | 16GB | OVMS 3.0.3 | 4NZWF4J | former autana | |
| blade13.testbed | bl0-13 | PEM610 | 5NZWF4J | former arauca; OVM 3.0.3 | |||||
| voor | arrone | PE1950 | 982MY2J | former arrone; status unclear; Jan Just? | |||||
| wiers | aulnes | PE1950 | B82MY2J | former aulnes; status unknown | |||||
| ent | (no ipmi) | Mac Mini | Intel Core Duo @1.66GHz | 2 | 2GB | OS X 10.6 | SATA 80GB | OS X box (no virtualisation) |
- *ipmi name is used for IPMI access; use
<name>.ipmi.nikhef.nl. - System details such as serial numbers can be retrieved from the command line with
dmidecode -t 1. - The service-tags can be retrieved through IPMI, but unless you want to send raw commands with ipmitool first you need freeipmi-tools. This contains ipmi-oem that can be called thus:
ipmi-oem -h host.ipmi.nikhef.nl -u username -p password dell get-system-info service-tag
IPMI serial-over-LAN
- For details, see Serial Consoles.
- can be done by
ipmitool -I lanplus -H name.ipmi.nikhef.nl -U user sol activate. - SOL access needs to be activated in the BIOS once, by setting console redirection through COM2.
For older systems that do not have a web interface for IPMI, the command-line version can be used. Install the OpenIPMI service so root can use ipmitool. Here is a sample of commands to add a user and give SOL access.
ipmitool user enable 5 ipmitool user set name 5 ctb ipmitool user set password 5 '<blah>' ipmitool channel setaccess 1 5 ipmi=on # make the user administrator (4) on channel 1. ipmitool user priv 5 4 1 ipmitool channel setaccess 1 5 callin=on ipmi=on link=on ipmitool sol payload enable 1 5
Data Migration
Bleek.nikhef.nl is designated to become the home directory server, DHCP server and OpenNebula server. It will be the only persistent machine in the entire testbed, the rest should be considered volatile. It will be the only machine where backups are done. But before all this can be arranged, it needs to be reinstalled with CentOS 5 (currently CentOS 4). All important data and configurations are going to be migrated to span.nikhef.nl as an intermediate step, and after the upgrade this will be moved back and merged on bleek.
Disk space usage on bleek (in kB):
50760 etc 317336 lib 432640 opt 877020 export 1035964 root 2353720 var 3258076 usr 357844380 srv
There is a script in place on span.nikhef.nl to do the backup from bleek, where /etc/rsyncd.conf is already set up.
rsync -a --password-file /etc/rsync-bleek-password --exclude /sys** --exclude /proc** --delete --delete-excluded bleek::export-perm /srv/backup/bleek/
It's not run automatically, so it should be run manually at the very latest right before reinstalling bleek.
Cruisecontrol migration
The former cruisecontrol instance on bleek has been stopped. The service has ben transferred to cruisecontrol.testbed(toom.nikhef.nl), while the data in /srv/project/rpmbuild has been transferred to span.nikhef.nl and is exported from there with NFS.
Network plan
There are three VLANs in use. All the physical machines (i.e. the hypervisors, Dom0 in Xen terminology) should configure bridges for all three; virtual machines then get interfaces for any combination depending on their role.
| vlan | description | network | gateway | ACL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | P4CTB | 194.171.96.16/28 | 194.171.96.30 | No inbound traffic on privileged ports |
| 8 | Open/Experimental | 194.171.96.32/27 | 194.171.96.62 | Open |
| untagged | local | 10.198.0.0/16 | testbed only |
Since there is limited public IP available, we should put machines in the local network as much as possible. For outbound connectivity NATting is arranged via their Dom0.
The machines that run Xen 3.0 on CentOS 5 use the following configuration for networking:
/etc/sysconfig/network:
NETWORKING=yes NETWORKING_IPV6=yes HOSTNAME=span FORWARD_IPV4=yes NOZEROCONF=true GATEWAY=194.171.96.30 GATEWAYDEV=eth0.2
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:
TYPE=Ethernet DEVICE=eth0 HWADDR=00:1e:4f:xx:xx:xx BOOTPROTO=none ONBOOT=yes USERCTL=no IPV6INIT=no IPV4INIT=yes NETMASK=255.255.0.0 IPADDR=10.198.x.y
(Fill in the mac address of the actual hardware, and the 10.198.0.0 network config for the machine.)
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.2:
VLAN=yes DEVICE=eth0.2 BOOTPROTO=static ONBOOT=yes TYPE=Ethernet NETMASK=255.255.255.240 IPADDR=194.171.96.x USERCTL=no IPV6INIT=no IPV4INIT=yes
This should result in a working network configuration before the start of the Xen daemon.
The Xen network scripts to use require an additional script to configure a VLAN bridge without any virtual network devices on it. The file /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp should have:
(network-script 'network-multi-vlan') (vif-script vif-bridge bridge=xenbr2)
And the script /etc/xen/scripts/network-multi-vlan contains: dir=$(dirname "$0")
"$dir/network-bridge" "$@" vifnum=0 "$dir/network-bridge" "$@" vifnum=2 netdev=eth0.2 "$dir/network-bridge-vlan" "$@" vlan=8 netdev=peth0
The network-bridge-vlan is non-standard; it creates a vlan interface, binds it to a bridge but leaves it unconfigured otherwise. This way the Dom0 doesn't have a Open/Experimental interface itself, but DomUs can connect their vifs to the bridge. The xen scripts are fairly complicated in the way they rename interfaces and transfer addresses and routes to the virtual counterparts; in case things go wrong, diagnostic information may be obtained from:
brctl show cat /proc/net/vlan/* ip link show netstat -rn
but be awary that the Xen scripts actually rename interfaces to make them look like normal ones.
All systems have at least 1GB interface, but put has two which may be trunked. This could be useful for serving machine images. The blade systems have extra interfaces and may be capable of doing iSCSI offloading to the NIC.
TODO: draw a network lay-out.
LDAP migration
We're going to ditch our own directory service (it served us well, may it rest in peace) in favour of the central Nikhef service. This means changing user ids in some (all?) cases which should be done preferable in a single swell foop.
We should request to add a testbed 'service' to LDAP with ourselves as managers, so we can automatically populate /root/.ssh/authorized_keys.
Here's a simple example of an ldapsearch call to find a certain user.
ldapsearch -x -H ldaps://hooimijt.nikhef.nl/ -b dc=farmnet,dc=nikhef,dc=nl uid=dennisvd
And here is the ldap.conf file to use for ldap authentication.
base dc=farmnet,dc=nikhef,dc=nl timelimit 120 bind_timelimit 120 idle_timelimit 3600 nss_initgroups_ignoreusers root,ldap,named,avahi,haldaemon,dbus,radvd,tomcat,radiusd,news,mailman uri ldaps://gierput.nikhef.nl/ ldaps://hooimijt.nikhef.nl/ ldaps://stalkaars-01.farm.nikhef.nl/ ldaps://stalkaars-03.farm.nikhef.nl/ ldaps://vlaai.nikhef.nl/ ssl on tls_cacertdir /etc/openldap/cacerts
Migration to a cloud infrastructure
This will be based on OpenNebula. Previous testbed cloud experiences are reported here.
