[Box-Admins] CI build slaves

[Chris Cunnington]

Looks good to me. It opens up the possibility of testing on more OSs, which sounds good. I'm figuring you'll post this on Squeak-dev for wider exposure. I can blog about it, too. Borg away.

Chris

Sent from my iWillJoinTheCollectivePad

On 2013-01-06, at 12:33 PM, Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Chris Cunnington and fellow box-admins,
> 
> I'm ready to report on my distributed build slave experiment, and
> wondered if you'd take a look at my proposed announcement before  I
> hit the send button. Usually I'd just send these kinds of things, but
> since I _use_ squeakci but don't _own_ it (in the responsibility
> sense), I thought I'd check here first for things like tone, and
> whether we'd want to allow people to help out in the below fashion.
> 
> In particular, there are possible security concerns, mostly on the
> client side, but possibly (in the sense that I don't know) on the
> server side. So:
> 
> <proposal>
> Hi,
> 
> Our community have very few dedicated official resources: running
> www.squeak.org and so on either takes cash or donations.
> 
> The new CI work is rather heavy CPU wise, and limited to (CentOS)
> Linux builds only. However, Jenkins supports the use of headless build
> slaves that connect TO a Jenkins master, permitting these slaves to
> run while still behind NATs.
> 
> I've been experimenting these past few days investigating using build
> slaves. I've set up jobs for building FreeBSD VMs (both broken,
> because FreeBSD support does lag behind the other platforms) and for
> running Trunk tests on OS X. You can see that we have some (known)
> network issues on OS X here:
> http://squeakci.org/job/SqueakTrunk-OSX/9/testReport/?
> 
> It's pretty easy to run a build slave. If you wish to donate some
> computing time, ask here and we can create a node for you, with a
> (unique) name of your choice. Once that's done, you need to
> * have (a recent version of) Java installed
> * download the slave.jar from  http://squeakci.org/jnlpJars/slave.jar
> * run the jar somehow. On a Unix machine that'll be $ java -jar
> slave.jar -jnlpUrl
> http://squeakci.org/computer/${SLAVENAME}/slave-agent.jnlp
> 
> What are the downsides? Jenkins masters can send arbitrary Java
> classes to a slave for running. That means that if squeakci.org's
> Jenkins was compromised, your build slave could potentially be
> compromised. You will want to, at the minimum, run the slave under a
> dedicated user with low privileges.
> 
> You can find more reading material here:
> https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Distributed+builds
> </proposal>
> 
> frank