At our next hackathon, Mark Jenkins will be giving a talk
We should have a post to announce as well.
Some details to add (your call on what to include in the announce post):
* I'm calling it a full VM server work day (other activities at the
hackathon of our course still welcome).
* Talk at 2pm, which yes, I will record with a camera and screen grab.
Not sure when I'll ever be able to edit/mix the screengrab and video
footage together.
* 7pm we're going to shut her down and move the motherboard and two
hard drives to a big (2U?, 4U?), black, rackmount case that was
previously used by Andrew that I think originally came from Linear. I
need someone to find and isolate the appropriate nuts and bolts for
this, perhaps tape them to this big black case (currently on storage
shelf) so they can be found at the appropriate time.
The talk will include a demo of the stuff we've had for awhile now:
* The core VM software (qemu-kvm with libvirt and virtmanager)
* The MUMD graphical shell account system that's is available as a service
* Account claiming, remote access
And I'll be introducing some new stuff
* A Skullhost shared web hosting service (slogan, "not everyone needs
a dedicated web server") with support for php and ruby via mod-fcgid,
python via wsgi, and a postgres and mysql account for each user.
* http proxy server that runs on the host OS with a public IP -- it
can proxy http requests to other web servers at skullspace (virtual or
real) for the sake of sharing the public ip address. (slogan, "not
everyone needs a public ip address")
* iSCSI and iPXE / personal workstation service -- for net booting
your own personal operating system on Skullspace workstations. Hopefully
this doesn't cause our two people who are going to buy dedicated desks
to back out. :P
http://www.skullspace.ca/wiki/index.php/Personal_workstation_service
(flipside: hopefully it prevents us from selling off the entire space as
private desks, :P :P )
* With any luck, I may have ready for Saturday a demonstration of the
above iSCSI/iPXE personal workstation service running HPL (High
Performance Linpack) that is used to benchmark the world's top 500 super
computers. We'll see how many FLOPS can be had by combining two cores on
our VM server, the two shelved workstations, the graphics workstation,
and the lounge computer.
(And of course, I won't leave things set up that way, the whole idea
here is that one possible use of the iPXE/iSCSI personal workstation
service is that you can do things like set up a cluster and tear it down
at the end of the night and easily set it up again another day. We'll
never need a dedicated cluster taking up space and power)
After the talk there are some open work projects involving custom in
house code:
* The account claiming system introduces a major security risk of
escalation to root by any gremlin that visits our LAN. I've put thought
into the security, but I'll be inviting folks to punch holes.
* The instructions for the shared http proxy service will basically
be, "ask Mark". We need a web interface where folks can self serve on
this. (perhaps custom code isn't needed and there is a reasonably user
friendly web GUI already out there for this)
* The instructions for this iPXE/iSCSI personal workstation service
will basically be "ask Mark". Again, a web interface is needed for self
service on allocating space (LVM), setting up iscsi targets on that, and
setting up iPXE menu entries. (again, perhaps custom code not needed and
something can be found?)
That's the new code side of things. I'll also be around to take
configuration / sys admin suggestions/changes from folks as well.
Mark
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