OZ Development & Custom Partitions

[Jeff VanDellen]

Hello,

My name is jeff vandellen I am a systems engineer for LiquidWeb Inc. I
am interested in contributing to development of OZ, additionally I
have a few questions I was wondering if somebody could answer for me.
Thanks in advance

1.) Can custom partitions be setup when doing an oz-install

2.) Is there anymore documentation out there that you could provide for me?

Thanks again.

[Chris Lalancette]

On 04/12/11 - 01:22:44PM, Jeff VanDellen wrote:
> Hello,
>
> My name is jeff vandellen I am a systems engineer for LiquidWeb Inc. I
> am interested in contributing to development of OZ, additionally I
> have a few questions I was wondering if somebody could answer for me.
> Thanks in advance
>
> 1.) Can custom partitions be setup when doing an oz-install

Unfortunately, not at the moment, though it has been on our wish-list for some
time.  Basically it requires defining an XML schema in the TDL to represent
the partitions (sizes, filesystems, etc), and then some implementation in
Oz itself to react to that schema.  Help here would be very welcome!
> 2.) Is there anymore documentation out there that you could provide for me?

There's a bunch of documentation up at http://aeolusproject.org/oz.html.
Unfortunately I don't have better development docs (or even pydoc) at the
moment; again, it is something on the wishlist.

Let me know if you have more questions, or are interested in tackling either
of these.

Thanks,

[Jeff VanDellen]

Thanks! I've read through the majority of the documentation. I see
that oz has a flag to pass a kickstart file to an install, but I
didn't see any more docs that go into more detail. I would love to get
involved, and I do write really good documentation and would be
willing to help as much as time allows. Additionally, I would really
like to get StormOnDemand  added as a cloud provider in the image
factory project.

Currently the storm api is in beta and there is not currently a method
for users to upload custom images, but I would like to know more
details on steps required to make that possible, what are the
requirements on our side and your side.  And of course I would like to
help in anyway possible.

Thanks in advance for your time.

Jeff

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 3:38 PM, Chris Lalancette  wrote:
> On 04/12/11 - 01:22:44PM, Jeff VanDellen wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > My name is jeff vandellen I am a systems engineer for LiquidWeb Inc. I
> > am interested in contributing to development of OZ, additionally I
> > have a few questions I was wondering if somebody could answer for me.
> > Thanks in advance
> >
> > 1.) Can custom partitions be setup when doing an oz-install
>
> Unfortunately, not at the moment, though it has been on our wish-list for some
> time.  Basically it requires defining an XML schema in the TDL to represent
> the partitions (sizes, filesystems, etc), and then some implementation in
> Oz itself to react to that schema.  Help here would be very welcome!
> > 2.) Is there anymore documentation out there that you could provide for me?
>
> There's a bunch of documentation up at http://aeolusproject.org/oz.html.
> Unfortunately I don't have better development docs (or even pydoc) at the
> moment; again, it is something on the wishlist.
>
> Let me know if you have more questions, or are interested in tackling either
> of these.
> Thanks,
>
> Chris Lalancette

[Justin Clift]

On 13/04/2011, at 8:32 AM, Jeff VanDellen wrote:
<snip>
> I would love to get involved, and I do write really good
> documentation

Heh, that should get you practically adopted around here. :)
> I would really like to get StormOnDemand added as a cloud
> provider in the image factory project.

Ahhhh, would "StormOnDemand be added as a cloud provider
to Aeolus" (the whole project) be what you're meaning?

Either way is welcome, but just wanting to clarify. :)

*If* you're meaning Aeolus as a whole, then there are
kind of two main parts to look at (my limited
understanding thus far):

+ Control of virtual machine instances, done using the
   Deltacloud API (http://incubator.apache.org/deltacloud/)

I think that would just mean writing a StormOnDemand
   driver for Deltacloud.  Cut-n-paste-n-modify an existing
   driver (kind of thing) will probably work.

+ Getting virtual machine images transferred into
   StormOnDemand.

This bit is done by Image Warehouse (iwhd).

The bottom diagram here shows the relationship bit's if
it's helpful:

http://www.aeolusproject.org/page/FUDCon_2011_Presentation

Notice the "image warehouse" there on the left, and the arrows
going between it and S3/CloudFiles.  Same thing on the right side
for "Deltacloud Driver" and EC2/CloudServers.
> Currently the storm api is in beta and there is not currently a method
> for users to upload custom images, but I would like to know more
> details on steps required to make that possible, what are the
> requirements on our side and your side.  And of course I would like to
> help in anyway possible.

Sure, you're not asking in a bad place at all.  For Image
Warehouse specifically, there's another mailing list you'll
probably want to jump on as well:

https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/iwhd-devel

Chris is on that team too, and is the right kind of person
to be asking.  Hope that helps. :)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

[Jeff VanDellen]

Thank you so much for your timely and detailed responses. I will hop
on the iwhd-devel list as well. I will be in touch.

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 7:50 PM, Justin Clift  wrote:
> http://incubator.apache.org/deltacloud/

[Chris Lalancette]

On 04/12/11 - 06:32:26PM, Jeff VanDellen wrote:
> Thanks! I've read through the majority of the documentation. I see
> that oz has a flag to pass a kickstart file to an install, but I
> didn't see any more docs that go into more detail. I would love to get
> involved, and I do write really good documentation and would be
> willing to help as much as time allows. Additionally, I would really
> like to get StormOnDemand  added as a cloud provider in the image
> factory project.

Excellent, would love the help.

I'm not entirely sure where to start, so I'll give an overview of the ideas
behind Oz.  You can ask questions where appropriate, and maybe we can get
closer to what your questions are.

The premise behind Oz is that the user should not have to enter in very many
details in order to get an install going.  Right now, the only information
Oz requires is the type of OS (Fedora, RHEL, Windows, etc), the architecture,
the "Release" (Windows 2003, Fedora 14, etc), and the path to the ISO to do
installation.  Oz has built-in knowledge of everything else it needs, including
automatic installation files (kickstart, autoattend, etc).  Given the above
information, Oz knows how to setup the install CD for a totally unattended
install, launch the install, and finish it off.

That being said, there are places that the user can override Oz's default.
One of these places is by passing in an alternate auto install config file
(for instance, a custom kickstart file).  This can be useful for just using
the Oz infrastructure with your custom kickstart.

That being said, we really want to have a more formal way to change some
installation-time parameters from within the Oz TDL.  For instance, every
single OS that we've run across so far has the ability to set the
root/Administrator password during install, so we should probably have a
<rootpw> element in the TDL that allows the user to specify this.  In this
same vein every OS allows you to specify custom partitioning schemes, so we
should probably have a way to let the user specify those in the TDL.

Hopefully this is a good overview.  Let me know where your specific questions
are.
> Currently the storm api is in beta and there is not currently a method
> for users to upload custom images, but I would like to know more
> details on steps required to make that possible, what are the
> requirements on our side and your side.  And of course I would like to
> help in anyway possible.

Justin Clift's mail responds to this part pretty well, so I'll let that
conversation take its own course.

[Kashyap Chamarthy]

On 04/13/2011 06:24 PM, Chris Lalancette wrote:
> On 04/12/11 - 06:32:26PM, Jeff VanDellen wrote:
> > Thanks! I've read through the majority of the documentation. I see
> > that oz has a flag to pass a kickstart file to an install, but I
> > didn't see any more docs that go into more detail. I would love to get
> > involved, and I do write really good documentation and would be
> > willing to help as much as time allows. Additionally, I would really
> > like to get StormOnDemand  added as a cloud provider in the image
> > factory project.
>
> Excellent, would love the help.
>
> I'm not entirely sure where to start, so I'll give an overview of the ideas
> behind Oz.  You can ask questions where appropriate, and maybe we can get
> closer to what your questions are.
>
> The premise behind Oz is that the user should not have to enter in very many
> details in order to get an install going.  Right now, the only information
> Oz requires is the type of OS (Fedora, RHEL, Windows, etc), the architecture,
> the "Release" (Windows 2003, Fedora 14, etc), and the path to the ISO to do
> installation.  Oz has built-in knowledge of everything else it needs, including
> automatic installation files (kickstart, autoattend, etc).  Given the above
> information, Oz knows how to setup the install CD for a totally unattended
> install, launch the install, and finish it off.
>
> That being said, there are places that the user can override Oz's default.
> One of these places is by passing in an alternate auto install config file
> (for instance, a custom kickstart file).  This can be useful for just using
> the Oz infrastructure with your custom kickstart.
>
> That being said, we really want to have a more formal way to change some
> installation-time parameters from within the Oz TDL.  For instance, every
> single OS that we've run across so far has the ability to set the
> root/Administrator password during install, so we should probably have a
> <rootpw>  element in the TDL that allows the user to specify this.  In this
> same vein every OS allows you to specify custom partitioning schemes, so we
> should probably have a way to let the user specify those in the TDL.
>
> Hopefully this is a good overview.  Let me know where your specific questions
> are.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for this overview,

Yeah, I was wondering if there is switch somewhere to set rootpwd in the TDL...I hope to 
take a deeper look once I get through my current time-pressed work.

But the idea of not having to enter very many details by user, and automating it just a 
few options is a very good premise..

Thanks.
> > Currently the storm api is in beta and there is not currently a method
> > for users to upload custom images, but I would like to know more
> > details on steps required to make that possible, what are the
> > requirements on our side and your side.  And of course I would like to
> > help in anyway possible.
>
> Justin Clift's mail responds to this part pretty well, so I'll let that
> conversation take its own course.