Re: Requalification of Alpha for etch
Hi,
Am 09.10.2005 um 22:38 schrieb Ken Raeburn:
I've never paid much attention to what goes into the buildd system,
so these may be very naive questions, but I'm curious:
Why is so much attention required? Is it for stuff that can't be
automated, or just hasn't been? (Aside from the really obvious,
like hardware issues.)
From my point of view it's less about constant care (security
updates) than fast response time. If a severe kernel exploit is found
James Troup deactivates the logins and drops you a note that a new
kernel is needed. A couple of days until the upgrade are ok, but it
shouldn't take weeks.
The building as such is fully automatic, Ryan Murray will care about
that.
Can multiple, lower-powered machines help? I'll probably be
getting my hands on another alpha system soon, a 400AU I think, but
it sounds like that may not be fast enough?
One extra high power Alpha would definitely be easier to maintain :)
(I've also got spare cycles on another alpha-linux box, and if we
had an Alpha equivalent to Xen, I could spare cycles from my alpha-
netbsd box too.) No GS320s on the horizon for me.
I can't tell you anything about running a buildd on a private
machine, but in order to get redundancy we'd need a second Alpha
which can do security builds... and the security team wouldn't like
that to be on a private machine :-)
I'd like to help out, but don't have the biggest amount of
resources to contribute, nor lots of my time on an ongoing basis,
so it never sounds like it's worth getting into it. But if I it
were just a matter of "oh, we wedged the machine again, please hit
the reset button and boot off the Buildd Live CD when you get a
chance so you can rejoin the build cluster", then I'd probably
pursue it....
I had to promise my new employer that maintaining the build machines
wouldn't take too much of my work time and I had no difficulties
doing that. It's a bit more than pressing reset (especially if new
exploits appear...) but otherwise not much after the initial
installation. Maybe you could care about a donated high power alpha
if Steve picks one?
Cheers
Thimo
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