[Soc-coordination] [Eucalyptus] Status Update ][gs (Week IV: A New Hope)

[David Wendt JR.]

Hello again, status update incoming!

This week I started working on VMBuilder, which is one of the more important components of the project. For those who aren't informed, VMBuilder is a quick and easy way to build images for various kinds of virtual machine environments. The stock 0.11 trunk supports ec2, xen, and ubuntu; Bzed maintains a Debian branch which supports etch currently. So I got ahold of those, put 'em in a Git repository[1] and started working.

The Debian support plugin had a bug with Xen support I fixed up; it was trying to grab Xen-compatible kernel packages by querying rmadison for a package named "linux-image-xen". This works fine for Ubuntu, but doesn't work on Debian because we call it "linux-image-2.6-xen-<arch>". So I changed the way it looks for kernels. Of course, now it won't work on Ubuntu, since the code isn't telling rmadison to check Debian specifically yet. (In a particularly grevious episode of idiot ball holding, it took 30 minutes of checking before someone on IRC reminded me that there is no "linux-image-xen" package in Debian.) Will have to get ahold of Bzed and ask him if he wants the patch once I can find the guy's email address.

I started building ec2 support into his plugin by looking over the ec2-specific functions from the Ubuntu plugin, seeing what each line does in the Ubuntu plugin and checking if Debian needs it. Currently I'm working on the etch.py; a lenny.py has yet to be written but I suspect it's not much different. I should talk to Eric Hammond sometime, since he deals with building AMIs alot.

As a side note, VMbuilder also currently won't be able to upload or register AMIs on Eucalyptus since it currently just tries to connect to AWS. Something else I will have to fix.

To sum it all up, for the next bi-weekly period, I plan to do the following:

 * Get VMbuilder pumping out Debian Etch and possibly Lenny AMIs.
 * Get ahold of Bzed and coordinate development of the vmbuilder-debian branch.

[1] git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-escience/vmbuilder.git
My Git repo for the VMbuilder work. Feel free to git-clone and play with it.