[Systems] RFC: Wanted: Servers for build farm

[Sascha Silbe]

This is the mail I'm going to send out to sugar-devel. Any comments?
Is the Prgmr bit
a) correct and
b) diplomatic enough?


Hi all!

As you might know, Sugarlabs is running a network of build machines for 
automatic and manual building of Sugar (on several distros) and SoaS (on 
Fedora). There are plans to integrate this with further automatic tests 
(e.g. SugarBot [1]) and even ideas like integration with aslo for 
providing precompiled activities (for those with binary blobs) for a 
variety of platforms. So the build network is going to be a vital piece 
of infrastructure.

The current slaves are hosted by Prgmr Xen Hosting (thanks!). 
Unfortunately, the host software running the VMs is getting too old to 
be useful (svn stopped working on the Fedora Rawhide slave) and we seem 
to be unable to reach Prgmr.
Since we'd like to extend our farm anyway (so we can test on more 
distros and more hardware), we're now looking for new server sponsors.

Ideally, we'd have one or more dedicated servers (i.e. with full control 
over the host) for each architecture, in order to decrease maintainance 
overhead, be able to add new targets fast and ensuring all slaves can 
work properly (i.e. host software not getting too old).
In practice, each single VM/buildslave is welcome (as long as we've got 
sufficient access on the host to control the VM), especially for non-PC 
architectures.

What the servers need:
- enough CPU cache (no Celeron/Duron)
- fast CPU preferred (but not a requirement)
- enough RAM for all VMs (0.5..1G per VM)
- enough HD space for all VMs (~10G per VM)
- stable internet access

What they don't need (but would be great of course):
- loads of network bandwidth (an occasional upload of SoaS is expected 
to be the largest transfer)
- low network latency
- RAID (all data is already stored elsewhere)
- loads of HD space (a standard 0.5TB drive should be sufficient for 
quite a while)


While we're looking for hosted servers (i.e. someone else maintains the 
hardware and provides network access), we'll probably be able to find a 
nice place if you'd like to donate just the hardware.


[1] http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/594
[2] http://www.prgmr.com/

CU Sascha

-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 489 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.sugarlabs.org/private/systems/attachments/20090405/7ba6af86/attachment.pgp