Adding a machine to the build farm

If you have a machine that you wish to add to our build farm then please follow the following instructions:

• Decide if your machine is suitable for the task:
  • Is it a production machine?
  • Is it security-sensitive?
  • Look at the output from the existing machines - would publishing file-system locations and IPs be a concern?
  • The nature of the task is that executable code is downloaded from (a site claiming to be) samba.org, and run on your machine by cron. Does this bother you?
  • Is this somebody else's machine?
  If you answer yes to any of these these questions, then we probably should not include it on the build farm.
• See if it is an OS/architecture combination that we already have. If it is then we won't need it unless the current machine we have covering that combination goes away for some reason.

• Make sure your machine is able to open an outgoing TCP connection to build.samba.org on port 873 (the rsync port). Test this by running

      rsync build.samba.org::
    

  and seeing if you get back the list of rsync modules.

  Note: there has been reports that rsync will work via http proxy. A simple

       export RSYNC_PROXY=cache:3128
    

  before running rsync should be all that is needed.

• If all is OK then create an account called "build" on the machine. If you can't create accounts then you can use an existing account, no special privileges are needed, just change ~build to your home directory in the instructions below.
• Make sure a recent version of rsync is installed on the machine
• Create a directory ~build/build_farm/. You will need about 120MB of free space for this directory.
• (optional) Install ccache and set a reasonable cache size (300MB would be plenty). This massively reduces the compilation times and system load for certain changes.
• Grab the script build_test from cvs or from http://www.samba.org/ftp/unpacked/build_farm/build_test and put it in ~build/build_farm/ .
• Edit the script if necessary to update the location of the build_farm directory.
• Tell The build farm maintainers the name of your machine (as given by the hostname command) and its OS and architecture plus what C compilers are installed. One of the team will send you a password. Put that in a file called ".password" in the build_farm directory.
• Run the script build_test once manually and make sure the build ran OK. Look in build.log for errors.
• Setup a cron job to run build_test regularly. You may wish to use "nice" to reduce its priority, for example I use the following cron entry:

      0,30 * * * * /bin/nice /home/build/build_farm/build_test 2> /home/build/cron.err
    

• Check that build.samba.org is showing your new host and that it is being updated regularly.

Note that only a very small amount of bandwidth is used. Andrew Bartlett reports having seen 6 of the boxes in the farm from behind a modem, and it only used a tiny proportion of that modems bandwidth. He also reports having had 2 of the machines behind a modem - dial-up links are fine too.

Thanks!