Re: New buildd and some obversations
On Sat, Feb 09, 2008 at 10:12:35AM -0500, Michael Casadevall wrote:
> The machine has a dynamic IP address, I have a
> dyndns pointed at the machine so its always
> accessable. However, for mail, and other services
> requiring a static IP, I have the domain name
> nemesisnetworks.com, and that has a mailserver on
> it; mail is delivered to both siren and diablos
> via fetchmail in multidrop mode; both can send
> using nemesisnetworks.com as a smarthost.
> Obviously enough, it isn't possible to directly
> access diablos (unless I did some massive hacked
> of my iptable scripts ;-)); you need to SSH into
> siren, and then you can rlogin (or SSH if you
> like waiting) into diablos.
That is not too different from my setup at home, only that I have "real"
m68k hardware. I only have a dynamic IP, but my router supports dyndns. On
my router I set up IP forwarding, so if you know the correct port number,
you can ssh directly to my m68k boxes behing the router/firewall. You can
either run ssh on that special portnumber, or have the forwarding point to
the ssh port on the machine behind the firewall, or even both at the same time.
Depends a little bit on your router/firewall.
On the dyndns address, I also receive mail for all buildds, the server
behind the firewall forwards mail on the internal network, and acts as a
smarthost for outgoing mail. Fetchmail might be more reliable, but I did not
see big problems yet. IPv6 would be another solution, but I only got the
initial tunnel working so far, not the subnet.
> If this setup is acceptable, I can also setup two
> more machines in a few more weeks into the same
> configuration.
That sounds great, I actually prefer virtual hardware, as real hardware
tends to break in the long run... but to use this as a debian-m68k buildd,
you'd first have to be a developer or maintainer, or give root access to the
m68k machine to a developer/maintainer. I hope that is sufficient to get
this accepted as a new m68k buildd, Stephen might know more? Then you also
need a developer/maintainer to sign the build logs, it does not have to be
the same person who has root access, but it helps if the person handling the
logs can work on the machine. I am not volunteering for either job...
> Anway, a couple of notes and obvervations I made
> during my setup of the buildd and such
>
> 1. With distcc, the compile part of building
> packages is very quick (compared to just plain
> complination), which does help cut down build
> times. The problem though comes with
> documetnation (I don't think there is much that
> can be done about this unless someone wants to
> write a distcc-like script for texinfo and
> friends). It took about two hours to build the
> documentation of zsh (about half an hour for each
> format it took). There has got to be a
> way we can reduce the time it takes.
The best would be to build the docs as separate arch-any package, so that it
has to be built only once. But it is up to the package maintainer to decide
that. We did have problems with docs for a long time, some tools to build
the docs did not work on m68k, it is such a waste of resources to build the
docs on a dozen arches. Works only if the docs are identical on all arches,
the debian-installer docs are arch dependant for example.
But as long as the package builds fine, it does not matter too much how long
it takes. Packages that fail to build are much more problematic, everything
else will get built eventually. We just need a few more buildds and a little
more time...
Christian
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