Because Screwing Up Only One Server At A Time Is Child's Play........

Sean — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 00:51:00 +0100

So the Dal-ACM hosted another Installfest on Saturday. Rather than be a simple spectator of cool stuff and mooching off the nice spread of snacks, I decided to be an actual PARTICIPANT this time.

So, the Dal-ACM has this ‘development server’ (of the desktop machine variety) called mblast. In times past (2 Installfests ago) Gentoo was installed on it for some reason. Every time this was upgraded, something broke. More importantly, since almost everyone could sudo su - for root, packages were installed and upgraded with impunity, resulting in things breaking often. Funnily enough, the DSU opt-out site was run from this machine, and someone actually upgraded it while the opt-out period was running.

So, flash forward back to the present. Since the Dal-ACM aquired slammer, more people have shifted their user accounts to that machine, leaving mblast somewhat underused with the exception of some of my own work. I figured, since with the exception of a few Ruby On Rails Cookbook tutorial instances, I was the only person using the machine, I could wipe it and play with a few things I have been thinking about for a while (and yes, I asked to make sure there was nothing critical and performed a backup anyway).

So, what did I end up doing? I decided to try my hand at virtualization. Set up Debian Stable as a host machine, installed Xen, set up a host server from disk, and started that up…....... two machines running on one machine’s hardware. It was pretty sweet to get running. Of course, it wasn’t as easy as reading those lines. I somehow screwed up a minimal Debian install, had problems with mblast’s hardware, some misinterpretation of the hardware, and oh yeah, the pain in the ass of backing up everyone’s data before wiping that sucker the first time.

In the end it was done, it was cool, and as soon as I figure out how to install other operating systems besides Debian (since I used debootstrap for that) and to have the virtual hosts actually accessible to the internet, I will be able to set up any operating system (well, linux or bsd really, unsure about Solaris) for people, and then they can screw it up to their heart’s content without affecting someone else’s work (assuming that work is on a different virtual server). Yeah, learning all that is what reading week will be partially for.

The other cool thing at Installfest was Roomba hacking. Several people in the CSB, including my friend Oliver, bought a Roomba (a programmable robot vacuum cleaner) a wireless router, and other items. Their goal is to power the router from the Roomba, install linux (WRT Firmware) on the routers, and then be able to control the Roombas remotely via wireless. Add in some USB ports on the router and you can do a lot of things with that.

At the installfest, most of the time was spent deconstructing the Roombas without breaking them. Towards the end, they actually experimented with powering the router from the Roomba. One problem: the router partly starts up and then…. dies. The Roomba is currently blamed, the theory being that, while the specs say 2 amps of current can be drawn from the Roomba, there is probably some regulator somewhere that doesn’t allow more than a percentage of that out of the power interface they are using. A set back to be sure, and I am looking forward to seeing how they solve it, and having those Roombas running around the CS building.

Dal Gazette Article - The Real Deal

Sean — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 11:34:00 +0100

Last week, Oliver and I were interviewed by the Dalhouse Gazette regarding TigerEvents, my.dsu.ca and Dal-ACM related items. The original plan, at least to my understanding, was that there would be a small blurb this week, with a larger article in the new year. I was not, however, expecting the article that actually was produced. Unfortunatly, I have to agree with several individuals that felt that it was poorly written and misleading. I don’t have any explanations, but thought that I would try to rewrite things so that they were clearer.

Local Students’ Software More Popular Than Expected

The “extracurricular hobby�? of two of Dalhousie Universities’ Computer Science students, Sean Smith and Oliver Baltzer, has taken off on both Sourceforge and Rubyforge, which contain thousands of open source projects. TigerEvents, the software powering the my.dsu.ca website, has achived a small measure of success over the past three months since its public debut, being downloaded roughly 150 times, and being propelled into the top five percent of active projects on both sites.

“It was a little unexpected,�? says undergrad student Sean Smith.

Smith and PhD candidate Oliver Baltzer released the program as open source software in September after spending the summer developing it with several other computer science students at the request of the DSU. However, after its public release, other users started looking at it for real world usage, including individuals as far away as the Netherlands.

Open source, for those who don’t know, is free software that can be downloaded not only for free use, but for modification as well. “Think of it as software made by the community for the community. It’s all about giving something back to the community,” explains Oliver Baltzer.

Baltzer and Smith say the feedback they receive from users also helps them improve the program. They expect the number of people downloading and using the program will increase over the next few months as they continue to make improvements. “We have a lot of ideas,” states Smith, “and if we are lucky, not only will we get people using the software, but actively helping with improvements as well.” They try to make new releases and updates to the program, as well as the my.dsu.ca site, every few weeks.

Smith and Baltzer are members of a society called the Dal-ACM, which is a student chapter of the worldwide Association for Computing Machinery. The Dal-ACM, in conjunction with the DSU, is currently discussing a number of online programs, including online society ratification, grants applications and an improved version of Tiger Books, the DSU’s online textbook exchange.

All the software for those projects would be released as an open source software package called Tiger Suite, says Baltzer, which could be used by other universities for their own purposes.

Crazy Or Genius?: Tag dal

Because Screwing Up Only One Server At A Time Is Child's Play........

Dal Gazette Article - The Real Deal