COSI Final Report

Michael McCabe

Spring 2005

Over the course of the semester most of my work for COSI has involved working on my OSDL contest submission with my team members and managing COSI. I attended both open houses and the majority of the workdays in addition to all of the meetings.

A ton of work has been done for my OSDL contest submission. On Thursday during finals week at 11 AM we will be doing a demo of what we have working which will include our distribution and our management system. I am not going to post any more details here because we are not sure what exactly we can say and what we cannot say due to the competition rules. We will be ready for a release that will be release candidate quality. The main reason that it is release candidate quality is that we do not have a heterogeneous testing environment. Due to hardware restrictions we have been able to test our product in only one configuration. I am hoping to have time to test on additional configurations right after I move home for the summer.

My group also presented a Workshop on Installing Xen on Ubuntu Linux. For this presentation we also created a tutorial. It can be found here. The workshop as well attended and we have received positive feedback on the guide from people who have used it on the Internet. I have also added sections that have not been published yet on LVM and installing several other distributions. They have not been published because I have been unable to test and edit them thoroughly.

Below are basic lists of some of the other things that I have done for COSI.

Mailing Lists Followed:

• Open AFS Development

• Debian s390

• Xen Development

• Xen Users

• Open AFS Info

• Fedora Extras

• Fedora Development

COSI Management Tasks Accomplished:

• Switched Sun servers to Debian

• Setup three raid units in the lab

• Fixed gallery on Statler

• Deployed firewalls on the sun servers

• Restricted remote logins on the sun servers

• Started developing a mentor program

• Added Fedora Extras and Debian to the mirror

• Researched a lot on new system specs

Lab Management Tasks:

• Established a lab build test procedure and sent it to Rouslan. There will be an on line web application for this starting in the fall

• Created Kick start files that can be used for a Fedora based lab build if I have enough time over the summer to package AFS

• Worked with Ed to create a Ubuntu Lab build that is currently alpha quality. Again it just needs AFS to be properly packaged with Clarksons AFS setup

I also have several goals for next semester. One is to switch or add proper hardware auto detection support into the lab build. The current system does not work well in a heterogeneous environment. For example if hard drives are different sizes we can only use the smallest drive in out current setup. Also configuration files are sym linked in through shell scripts and can be broken easily. Another one of my goals is to develop code for the Xen project, possibly something with the scheduler, virtual machine migration, or the balloon memory driver for Linux.

It would also be nice to work on developing the COSI Grading web application that was dropped due to my decision to start working on my OSDL contest submission.