New x86 machine

New x86 machine

[Jason Self]

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Hello,

There's a new x86-64 machine on the block (soon to be) building
things. Guix has been installed on it and hopefully its fast CPU, 16GB
of RAM and 2TB of storage will be pressed into service soon to help
with the upcoming giant rebuilds.

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Re: New x86 machine

[Ludovic Courtès]

This is really appreciated and welcome in this time of rebuilds, thanks!

Now the bottleneck has clearly become the front-end (at least in terms
of RAM, disk space, CPU.)  I think we have to consider moving the
front-end elsewhere, possibly on this new machine or the one provided by
TUM.

For that, we’ll need volunteers to help with:

  1. general sysadmin work.

  2. packaging of Hydra and its dependencies (Hydra is written in Perl
     and depends on a number of Perl libraries.)

For the brave hacker, there’s also this option:

  2b. Write a Hydra replacement in Scheme, probably building upon
      David’s neat guix-web.

Volunteers are eligible for a beverage offered by me.  :-)

Ludo’.

Re: New x86 machine

[David Thompson]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> This is really appreciated and welcome in this time of rebuilds, thanks!
>
> Now the bottleneck has clearly become the front-end (at least in terms
> of RAM, disk space, CPU.)  I think we have to consider moving the
> front-end elsewhere, possibly on this new machine or the one provided by
> TUM.
>
> For that, we’ll need volunteers to help with:
>
>   1. general sysadmin work.
>
>   2. packaging of Hydra and its dependencies (Hydra is written in Perl
>      and depends on a number of Perl libraries.)
>

From what I can tell, there is no official release tarball of Hydra.  I
guess we'd have to settle for packaging a snapshot of the git repo?

When trying to build Hydra, I get the error "configure: error: nix-store
is required".  Do I need to have Nix installed, or is there a configure
flag I can pass to use Guix?

> For the brave hacker, there’s also this option:
>
>   2b. Write a Hydra replacement in Scheme, probably building upon
>       David’s neat guix-web.

I wonder how difficult this would be.  I haven't explored the full
feature set of Hydra, but I bet we have all the building blocks that we
need.  It would be very interesting to explore this more.

-- 
David Thompson
Web Developer - Free Software Foundation - http://fsf.org
GPG Key: 0FF1D807
Support the FSF: https://fsf.org/donate

Re: New x86 machine

[Ludovic Courtès]

David Thompson <dthompson2@worcester.edu> skribis:

> From what I can tell, there is no official release tarball of Hydra.  I
> guess we'd have to settle for packaging a snapshot of the git repo?

Yes.

> When trying to build Hydra, I get the error "configure: error: nix-store
> is required".  Do I need to have Nix installed, or is there a configure
> flag I can pass to use Guix?

Hydra requires Nix for its command-line interface and for its Perl
bindings.  But it uses only the low-level stuff (essentially what the
(guix store) module provides), which is compatible between Nix and Guix.

>> For the brave hacker, there’s also this option:
>>
>>   2b. Write a Hydra replacement in Scheme, probably building upon
>>       David’s neat guix-web.
>
> I wonder how difficult this would be.  I haven't explored the full
> feature set of Hydra, but I bet we have all the building blocks that we
> need.  It would be very interesting to explore this more.

I think we’d rather think in terms of the features we need.  The
3-process architecture described at
<http://hydra.nixos.org/job/hydra/trunk/tarball/latest/download-by-type/doc/manual>
under “Getting Started” should be mostly appropriate, I think.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

Re: New x86 machine

[Sergio Durigan Junior]

On Friday, August 29 2014, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> For that, we’ll need volunteers to help with:
>
>   1. general sysadmin work.

Hey Ludo :-).

I can help with this if needed.  I don't have much more time to do other
things for now, unfortunately...

Cheers,

-- 
Sergio
GPG key ID: 0x65FC5E36
Please send encrypted e-mail if possible
http://sergiodj.net/

Re: New x86 machine

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Sergio,

Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj@sergiodj.net> skribis:

> On Friday, August 29 2014, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>
>> For that, we’ll need volunteers to help with:
>>
>>   1. general sysadmin work.
>
> Hey Ludo :-).
>
> I can help with this if needed.

That would be appreciated!  The first thing to do would be to subscribe
to guix-sysadmin.

Then we really need to streamline sysadmins work so we can efficiently
share work, have clear procedures, etc.

For instance, we should agree on who can access the slaves (currently it
depends on the machine), how to avoid stepping on each other’s toes when
doing something on the front-end, things like that.  There’s a lot of
room for improvement here, and I think it’s about time to do something
about it.  :-)

So if you or anyone else has experience with this, or ideas on how to
best organize, I’m all ears.

Ludo’.