Server test plans - EC2?

[Neal McBurnett]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2007 at 08:30:21AM -0400, Aaron Kincer wrote:
> I would suggest to include Domain and Active Directory testing for Samba 
> if you aren't already.

I've been thinking about this over the last month.  I haven't gotten
my ideas fully together for posting, and am headed out this morning,
but let me throw these ideas out.

To help people test clients and enterprise configurations for AD and
LDAP and Kerberos, we'd benefit from some sort of testbed out there.
I thought up one possible name:

 TESTUBE - TESTbed for UBuntu Enterprise.

Assuming we get Launchpad working as an OpenID provider, it could
be used to set up accounts based on team memberships or whatever.

What are the testing modes, approaches?

 Configure ldap, kerberos, etc servers and domains, with test accounts

 Configure relying parties: machines for login, samba shares, web
 servers, etc

 Use authtool to configure clients, and also do them by hand.

Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (ec2) looks like a great resource for
this sort of testing, since anyone with an ec2 account can quickly set
up new servers out there as needed for tests.  They basically make
nice Xen-based servers available for $0.10 an hour, with your choice
of Linux-based OS.  If you want to run an server full time that works
out to $73 a month, but if you just want occasional availability for
tests of certain auth server and relying party server configurations,
it can be dirt cheap.  And you can run qemu virtual machines on top of
ec2, I think.

 http://amazon.com/ec2/

A single script could set up an entire multi-machine enterprise
network for testing purposes for a few hours, and then take it down,
with a total cost of a few bucks.


EC2 itself is in limited beta, and it can take time to get an account,
though.  In the meantime, you can get started trying things out for
free at https://www.rightscale.com/

With the right scripts, we could even automate the production of tribe
or even daily server builds (with debootstrap?), ready for folks to
try out.

If someone put a mirror of the tribe ISOs and perhaps some other stuff
from the repositories in Amazon's Simple Storage Service (s3 -
http://amazon.com/s3/) for $0.15 per GB per month, it would
be fast and free for folks to access that storage from any ec2
machine.


And eventually we'll want to use some techniques like this to set up
an Ubuntu Grid or something that members can log into and share
resources on :-)

Besides that, since startups are beginning to use ec2 for all their
infrastructure, we could provide a ready-made Ubuntu-based enterprise
solution for folks to launch and customize in minutes.

But of course a testbed could be based on other grid technologies
besides ec2, like the AppLogic grid system.  At this point I've heard
good things about ec2 and gotten a taste of them, but just got my
account yesterday so I'm hardly the expert or a salesman :-)


Cheers,

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/

> Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > We should develop some server test plans so we vcan do sensible 
> > validation testing as vwe approach release. So far we have really only 
> > checked that the LAMP stack installs.
> >
> > This will of course depend on which features are implemented. What 
> > should be the basic use cases? Web server, small office file/printer server?
> >
> > Perhaps you can give some preliminary thought to this at your server 
> > sprint and we can hash out some test procedures.
> >
> > Henrik
> > Ubuntu QA
> >
> > ps. please CC me on replies; I'm not taking mail delivery from this list