[tech] [wheel] New Mussel

[David Adam]

I'm forwarding this to tech@, because there's nothing confidential.

On Mon, 22 Jul 2013, Sam Moore wrote:
> There is a VM on medico called neomussel at the moment.
> As the name suggests, the idea is to get rid of the dependence on mylah.

Great. I think, although I have no real evidence, that the problems with 
Mussel dropping out recently are due to something to do with Xen 
networking.

> It is not just mussel copied and pasted. I gave up on that after realizing
> that mussel had things like wine and enemy territory and pulse audio (sound on
> a VM?) installed. It is debian wheezy 7.1 without X11.

X11 and PulseAudio both work over the network, so they are not necessarily 
daft things to have installed.
 
> I'm trying to redo things from scratch, copying config files when that works.
>  
> [BOB] supervised setting up of LVM the Right(TM) way.
> 
> So far I've copied the ircd-hybrid config file; things seem to work.
> Currently irc2 is a cname to neomussel, and XReaper has setup the cassa end of
> a bridge.
> 
> I made a start on apache, but haven't gotten much done. I want to do the
> easiest things first.

Remember that if you want to run user webspace from the new machine, it 
will need to have user logins enabled. Otherwise it gets very difficult to 
debug problems!

> All the SOE except LDAP is installed. I wasn't sure making it an LDAP client
> when we will want to turn it into a server later wouldn't result in a world of
> pain and LDAP. Root keys are installed.

Mussel is currently an LDAP client for PAM and NSS, as well as an LDAP 
server. We will definitely need to turn it into an LDAP client, and we 
can make it an LDAP server entirely independently of this.

> I have been informed that neomussel, and in fact mussel are bad names.
> 
> So... what should new mussel be called?

Maral? Mote? Madi?

> On a semi related note... without mussel running on mylah, is there any
> purpose to mylah? Do we really need a machine that just nfs mounts /away and
> then nfs exports it? I ask this because originally the plan was to virtualise
> mylah.

Mylah also runs the Samba domain master, but this could easily be moved to 
another machine without much trouble.

> If I receive no outraged responses, I will continue doing what I am doing.
> If no one cares what the name is, I will pick the easiest name to spell that
> follows our naming conventions.

I think this is going to take a really long time, and although "cleaning 
up" is a reasonable goal, Mussel runs a huge number of important services. 
If we can't get to the bottom of why the network drops out, we should 
seriously consider moving the entire image over to Medico/KVM as well as 
migrating it to the new machine.

David Adam
UCC Wheel Member
zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au