Older blog entries for skvidal (starting at number 433)

ansible and builder creation/provisioning etc

I posted this to the ansible list but I thought I’d point it out here, too:

http://fedorapeople.org/cgit/skvidal/public_git/scripts.git/tree/ansible/start-prov-boot.py

For fedora infrastructure we wanted to make our builders trivial to refresh and reinstall. They hadn’t been that easy to do before and ideally I wanted something I could have done without any user intervention at all.

However, I did not want to just instantiate a pre-existing image for multiple reasons:

1. b/c it includes an implicit amount of staleness in the img – and ongoing maintenance

2. b/c it includes a certain amount of dirtiness b/c of the sysprep scripts are not as clean as a brand-new kickstart is

3. in any case I wanted something that could work in other places and with other virt tools.

The above is a first cut – but it mimics the vm kickstarting process we use for a lot of hosts in fedora infrastructure. However, it does it all using ansible to flow-control the whole thing.

I’m positive someone will mention some other mechanism I could have used to do the same thing. I’m not very interested, to be honest. I wanted something that:

1. didn’t require me to do a bunch of special magic in the kickstart %post to be able to molest/handle the instance  (in this case I just need to suck down an authorized_keys file)

2. didn’t require any special software installed on the instance (in this case ansible only needs a running sshd – which I cannot imagine installing a system w/o)

3. was relatively easy to work with for the future.

4. something that was so loosely tied to any specific instance-creation program or platform that I could easily swap out one for the other or make it modular w/o a massive restructuring.

5. was in python :)

anyway – it worked very nicely to spin up the 35 buildvm instances for the current koji rebuild and if nothing else, I’m quite pleased with that.

 


Syndicated 2012-07-19 19:55:55 from journal/notes

mockremote

I’ve been working with ansible and mock to make a simpler tool for building some pkgs on a remote system. I started on ftbfs but I wanted something for a less involved build process. Essentially a ‘build these pkgs over there and fetch back the results as you go’ command. So this is mockremote.

mockremote:
 mockremote will build a set of packages on a remote machine using mockchain. 
If you specify more than one package it will build them one at a time on the remote machine
allowing for each previous result to be used as a buildreq for the one before. Just like
mockchain it will will optionally build them recursively until it can no longer achieve
a successful build.
It retrieves the results from each build via rsync after each pkg completes. This ensures
that in the event of a remote system crash you lose the least number of pkgs.
If you restart the build, pointing to the same destdir it will only build those pkgs which
did not complete before.

 - requires mock, mockchain on remote system
 - requires the user you specify for the remote system be able to run mock/mockchain 
   (defaults to user mockbuilder)
 - requires ansible and rsync locally
 - requires you have ssh keys for the host on which you wish to build

 mockremote -b hostname -u username -r mock_chroot -a url pkg pkg pkg

It’s a pretty straightforward command and works nicely for building 
things in a set when your remote system is in a better place or has 
better bandwidth or just better cpu/ram combos to build a package
you want built.

I know what you’re thinking: “But can’t I do all this with ssh and running mockchain on the remote host by myself?”

and the answer to that is – yes – you can – this command just means you don’t HAVE to, which is nice.


Syndicated 2012-06-26 15:52:42 from journal/notes

things I’ve learned today

1. @ IN CNAME someserver.org

is REALLY not allowed and won’t work anytime soon – despite it being reasonable that it should.

2.  [[ $a == something* ]] – is a nice shorthand in bash for ‘startswith’ for string comparison

3. [[ requires you use && and || instead of -a and -o

4. A way to use the git pre-receive hook to bludgeon certain kinds of checks everytime (zone files anyone?)

5. how much about dnssec seems to be somewhat ‘magical’ and not in a good way.

 


Syndicated 2012-06-13 07:27:04 from journal/notes

mockchain grows a couple more options

mockchain has grown a couple more options:

-r chroot

originally the chrootname was the first argument – but that became an annoyance and limitation for some other plans so I just made it -r. This is now required to make it work

I also made it so the pkgs you specify can be local pkgs or they can be http[s] urls to pkgs. mockchain will fetch and build them for you. This is in order to achieve some other evil plans I have.

 


Syndicated 2012-05-03 17:12:04 from journal/notes

spherical cow

I wanted to make sure people knew the background on spherical cow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

having worked as a sysadmin in a physics department this was a bit of a running gag so the name amuses me.

It was good to be amused by things while working in the physics dept :)

 


Syndicated 2012-05-02 16:21:03 from journal/notes

mockchain use cases and examples

I’ve mentioned mockchain a few times here. An interaction with averi today on irc pointed out that I should give some examples of how to use it.

Use case #1:

I have a big pile of srpms – I’m pretty sure they all build, but not sure in what order, I want them all built against fedora-16-x86_64.

 mockchain fedora-16-x86_64 -l /tmp/myrepo –recurse *.src.rpm

That will produce a dir at /tmp/myrepo which has a config and results dir filled with: resulting pkgs and the logs from the build process in a subdir per package.

Inside the results dir there will be a fedora-16-x86_64 dir which is a yum repository and can be referred to in a yum repo configuration like:

[myrepo-fedora-16-x86_64]

name= my repo I just built with mockchain

baseurl=file:///tmp/myrepo/fedora-16-x86_64/

 

It will also try to build each and every package and any failures will be tried again after everything else has been built – and this will continue in a loop until either all the packages are successfully built or the failures are identical on two loops.

Use Case #2:

I have a bunch of src.rpms, I want to build them, one at a time. After each package build I want to rsync my packages up to fedorapeople immediately for everyone to use.

for pkg in ~/pkgs/*.src.rpm

do

mockchain fedora-16-x86_64 -l /tmp/myrepo $pkg

rsync -avH -e ssh /tmp/myrepo/results/ fedorapeople.org:public_html/myrepo

done

Use Case #3:

I have some new pkgs I want to build for fedora-16-x86_64. I have a remote repository that contains additional pkgs which provide some of my build dependencies for these new pkgs.

mockchain fedora-16-x86_64 -a http://servername/path/to/my/remote/repo -l  /tmp/myrepo -c *.src.rpm

 

This will give you a repo in /tmp/myrepo/results/fedora-16-x86_64

 

Just a few examples of how you can use mockchain in your daily operations.


Syndicated 2012-04-20 22:16:07 from journal/notes

mockchain.py –recurse

On a suggestion from kevin – I added a –recurse option to mockchain. It builds all the pkgs it can and records the failures. When it gets to the end of the stack it tries to build the failures again and keeps trying until either: everything succeeds or the set of failures is the same – twice in a row.

Works pretty well to build a giant pile of pkgs and walk away.

I also talked to clark about mockchain and mock and he’s going to pull it in as a script in mock itself once I get it ready.

Here’s the latest version of things:

http://fedorapeople.org/gitweb?p=skvidal/public_git/scripts.git;a=blob_plain;f=mock/mockchain.py;hb=HEAD

Try it out and let me know what it needs.

 


Syndicated 2012-04-19 04:25:28 from journal/notes

mockchain.py update

I added:

 

 -a url - add this repo url to the yumconfig for the buildroot. This can
          be specified multiple times. Let's you point to multiple
          paths beyond the default to pull build deps from.

 


Syndicated 2012-04-15 04:24:27 from journal/notes

mockchain.py

Talking to halfline today and yesterday I decided to spend a little time playing with this for another project.

mockchain

mockchain.py [options] chrootname file.src.rpm [file1.src.rpm] [file2.src.rpm] ...

Builds a series of srpms in mock one at a time. After each successful build
of a package it adds the resulting packages to a local repo which
are available to the next package to satisfy buildreqs.

options:
 -c - continue on package build failure - by default it will exit if
      a package fails to build. set this if you wish it to try and continue
      for the rest of the packages.

 -l path - set the path to put the results/repo in. This path needs to be
    somewhere accessible to users other than you for reading as the
    mock process doesn't run as you.

This does not try to sort the packages by build order b/c that is too much 
effort and not obviously doable with the buildreq information we have.

The build process when you use -l is idempotent so a package which has
already been successfully built will not be built again.
If you want to force the rebuild of a package which has been built 
successfully simply remove the 'success' file from the dir with 
the package results in it.

Syndicated 2012-04-13 20:28:06 from journal/notes

ansible basic operating theory explained

Talking on irc tonight pointed out a lacking in the docs of ansible. Specifically, explaining the dirt-simple nature of how it works.

0. ansible has modules – modules are just executable code/scripts in any language you want – there are only 2 requirements:
a. that whatever language you want to write them in is available on the remote system(s)

b. that the modules return json as their results.
1. ansible connects to a host(or many hosts) using ssh

2. ansible shoves across the module(s) you want to run

3. ansible shoves across the arguments you  want to pass to the module(s)

4. ansible runs the modules with the arguments

5. ansible gets back json from the modules and sends it to the calling script/program to be handled and/or displayed.

 

Now – for a lot of people the only module they really care about it is the ‘command’ or ‘shell’ module – which just lets you run a command directly on the system and it returns the results to the calling program. Pretty handy for any number of things. However, you can write a custom module – which is really nothing more than a script that ansible runs remotely. Ansible just handles the communication/execution part to multiple systems at the same time and return the results back to you, sensibly.

So that’s the dead-simple version of what ansible can do.

How do you as an admin wanting to test it out get started?

git clone https://github.com/ansible/ansible.git

cd ansible

echo “somehost-i-have-root-on” > ~/ansible-hosts

. ./hacking/env-setup

If you have a root ssh key setup then you can run:

bin/ansible all -i ~/ansible-hosts “uptime”

if you don’t have a root ssh key setup then run:

bin/ansible all -k -i ~/ansible-hosts “uptime”

 

it will prompt you for the root password

Add more hosts to ~/ansible-hosts to talk to more at the same time.

 


Syndicated 2012-04-11 05:29:40 from journal/notes

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