Re: aqc-create.py: install autoqa clients easily

[James Laska]

On Fri, 2010-07-09 at 09:24 -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:
>  Hello,
>  
>  I have created a simple python script to simplify installation of autoqa 
>  clients into virtual machines. As our autoqa efforts progress (setting
>  up staging servers etc) it is quite common task to do, so this script will
>  save you a lot of manual labor.
>  
>  Script is called "aqc-create.py" ("_Auto_QA _client - create") and is
> available
>  in 'aqc' branch in utils/ directory in our git:
>  
>    http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=autoqa.git;a=tree;f=utils;hb=aqc
>  
>  Usage is simple:
>  
>    $ aqc-create.py -n Example
>  
>  will create Fedora 13 virtual machine with <your-arch> arch, 512MB RAM and 
>  storage /dev/vg_autoqa/Example.
>  
>    $ aqc-create.py -n Example2 -f 12 -a i386 -r 1024 --disk /tmp/Example2.img -v -d
>  
>  will create Fedora 12 machine with i386 arch, 1024MB RAM and storage
>  /tmp/Example2.img. It will be verbose and it will not attach you to the serial
>  console of the new machine, so the installation will run on background.
>  
>  More options are available, see --help.
>  
>  
>  The installation is fully automatized and it uses kickstart generated by simple
>  wsgi application available in utils/aqc-ks/ directory. It is currently deployed 
>  at our staging server:
>  * help usage:
>    http://test1185.test.redhat.com/wsgi/aqc-ks/aqc-ks
>  * example usage:
>    http://test1185.test.redhat.com/wsgi/aqc-ks/aqc-ks?release=13&arch=x8...
>  
>  (This is just an implementation detail, the script uses it automatically and you
>  don't have to care about it.)
>  
>  
>  aqc-create.py will do these things for you:
>  * call virt-install with correct options (kickstart path, serial console 
>  redirection, boot kernel location, etc)
>  * generate a kickstart
>  * add jlaska's autoqa repo
>  * install autotest and autoqa packages and disable their cron tasks
>  * add autotest-server's ssh certificate to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
>    (currently the staging server's certificate is added by default)
>  
>  The client is fully prepared automatically and all you have to do at the 
>  autotest-server is call these commands:
>  $ ssh root@<hostname> 'true' # just to add the fingerprint to known_hosts
>  $ atest host create -t x86_64 -b fc13,virt <hostname> # change labels if needed
>  
>  (If you have ideas how to get rid of the first line, comments are welcome.)
>  
>  
>  So, please comment and report problems, but I have used it many times in the last
>  few days and it seems to be working really well. Maybe we can even use it in our
>  tutorial wiki pages, it may help beginners to start with AutoQA. I'll try to 
>  document it later.
>  
>  
>  If you think this script is valuable, I would like to integrate it into our master
>  branch. Do you think the name (aqc-create/aqc-ks) and the location (utils/) is fine,
>  or do you have other suggestions? Or maybe we want to have it stored somewhere else
>  than in autoqa source code? Let me know. 
Don't know if this was already decided or not, but utils/ seems like a
logical first step to get this into master.  As you note, we can
determine a more appropriate location when we begin integrating the
virt-guest support more tightly into the autotest/autoqa test workflow.

Thanks,
James