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
Cruisecontrol	bleek	move	build system for VL-e and BiG Grid
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

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 beerput. 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.

name	Serial No	type	chipset	#cores	mem	OS	disk	remarks
bleek	CQ9NK2J	PE1950	Intel 5150 @2.66GHz	4	8GB	CentOS4-64	software raid1 2×500GB disks	High Availability, dual power supply, to be renamed
toom	DC8QG3J	PE1950	Intel E5440 @2.83GHz	8	16GB	CentOS5-64	Hardware raid1 2×715GB disks
kudde	CC8QG3J	PE1950	Intel E5440 @2.83GHz	8	16GB	CentOS5-64	Hardware raid1 2×715GB disks
span	FP1BL3J	PE2950	Intel E5440 @2.83GHz	8	24GB	CentOS5-64	Hardware raid10 on 4×470GB disks (950GB net)	DHCP,DNS,NFS,LDAP
melkbus		M600	Intel E5450 @3.00GHz	8	32GB	CentOS5-64	2x 320GB SAS disks	to be renamed
odin		PE1950	Intel 5150 @2.66GHz	4	8GB	CentOS5-64	software raid1 2×500GB disks	High Availability, dual power supply
put								former garitxako
autana		M600						to be renamed
arauca		M600						to be renamed
arrone								to be renamed
aulnes								to be renamed
ent		Mac Mini	Intel Core Duo @1.66GHz	2	2GB	OS X 10.6	SATA 80GB	OS X box (no virtualisation)

Network plan

All of the machines should be put in the P4CTB VLAN (vlan 2), which is covered by ACLs to prevent public access. This is a first line in defence against intrusions. In some cases we may like to run virtual machines in the open/experimental network (vlan 8); for that the trick is to create a second bridge with a tagged ethernet device in vlan 8: see /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.8

VLAN=yes
DEVICE=eth0.8
BOOTPROTO=static
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
IPV6INIT=no
IPV4INIT=no

Then: ifup eth0.8 and

brctl addbr broe
brctl addif broe eth0.8

Unfortunately, the IPV6INIT=no doesn't help, it gets an IPv6 address anyway. This bridge can then be used to add virtual network devices for machines that live in open/experimental.

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.

IPv4 space is limited, and until the network upgrade (planned 2011Q1-3?) we're stuck with that. The current scheme of SNATting may help us out for a while.

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.