[Ns-developers] buildbot

[Mathieu Lacage]

hi,

Recently, Faker did setup an initial buildbot master installation on
http://ns-regression.ee.washington.edu:8010/ which is used to control a
couple of slaves: various compiler versions on fc10/x86-64 (a fedora box
located at the inria), osx-ppc (an old apple laptop sitting in craig's
office at university of washington), cygwin, and mingw (a 64bit vista VM
running within a fedora box at the inria).

The current buildmaster requests a single build per day on each
buildslave and reports the result on the above-mentionned url but also
on irc (irc.freenode.net#ns-3) and on the ns-developers mailing-lists.
The irc bot and the mailing-list email generate notifications only for
build state changes which means that we won't get an email to tell us
that the build is correct: we will get an email to tell us that the
build is now correct and was incorrect before or is now incorrect and
was correct before.

Every developer who has been granted ssh access to
ns-regression.ee.washington.edu is also able to send special build
requests to the master:

1) you can tunnel through ssh the port 8011 on ns-regression with the
following ssh command: "ssh -L8011:localhost:8011
ns-regression.ee.washington.edu" and, then, direct your browser to
http://localhost:8011/. The resulting webpage looks very much like the
publicly-accessible one except that some pages contain forms to request
builds on one or multiple buildslaves.

2) you can also use the buildbot "try" mechanism to request builds with
specific patches:
"buildbot try --diff=./my-patch.diff -p1 --builder=osx-ppc-g++"
To get the above to work I use the following ~/.buildbot/options file:
-------------------------------
try_connect='ssh'
try_host='ns-regression.ee.washington.edu'
try_username='mathieu'
try_patchlevel=1
masterstatus='localhost:9990'
try_dir='/home/buildmaster/master/jobdir'
-------------------------------
this assumes that you have the associated entries in ~/.ssh/config:
-------------------------------
Host ns-regression
HostName ns-regression.ee.washington.edu
User mathieu
ForwardAgent yes
ForwardX11 yes
LocalForward 8011 localhost:8011
LocalForward 9990 localhost:9990
-------------------------------

A small cool item is the gtk-based gui you can use to monitor the status
of the buildmaster:
"buildbot statusgui"
or the command-line interface:
"buildbot statuslog"
Both of the above require the correct setup of your ssh/config and
buildbot/options files, as well, as an open ssh connection to
ns-regression.

In the future, I plan to enable nsc builds on supported platforms. If
you are interested in getting access to the buildbot try feature, you
need to send an email to tomh at tomh.org. Finally, if you are interested
in providing a new buildslave to increase the size of our buildfarm,
drop me a private email and I will update the buildmaster config to wait
for connections from your buildslaves.

regards,
Mathieu