Last updated: 2018-07-13 04:09:23 +0100
Upstream URL: git clone http://chriswarbo.net/git/desktop-scripts.git
Contents of README follows
Chris Warburton - Last updated 2018-02-06
This repository contains configuration, scripts, etc. for the desktop machine I use as a build server. A detailed explanation of the setup is given below, for investigation/debugging purposes.
There are two ethernet sockets on this machine, but neither seems to work. To remedy this, I’ve connected a USB WiFi dongle. It uses my eduroam credentials with NetworkManager. There are a few scripts (nm-connect.sh, redo-nm.sh, etc.) which try to restart NetworkManager periodically or when it dies; these are rather hit and miss :(
This dongle used to require some newer kernel modules than were available when I set up the machine, so I backported some and wrote a script (usb-wifi.sh) and instructions (USB_Wifi_Instructions) to initialise the dongle. This may not be necessary after subsequent upgrades.
The script tunnel.sh will set up a reverse SSH tunnel to the domain given in the file ‘details’ (kept out of git), making this machine’s port 22 (SSH) available on localhost as the port given in ‘details’. The port is only available locally on that machine, it is not accessible externally (i.e. trying to connect to domain:port won’t work; only localhost:port will work, from on that machine). The SSH key used to connect is password protected. Access is only allowed with a key, not a password.
I use this tunnel to access this machine from my laptop (whether I’m sat next to it or on the other side of the world). I connect to the given domain and from there I connect to localhost:22222 which is this machine. To log in to this machine I use an SSH key, stored on my laptop. I use an SSH agent to propagate my identity across the intermediate domain, so that it never sees this key.
As well as accessing GNU screen over SSH, this is useful for tunnelling the Hydra Web interface (see below), SSHFS and occasionally for VNC access.
This machine is mostly used to run the Hydra build server.
Hydra’s job is to poll the git repositories of various projects every few minutes, and when new commits are found it will try to build those new versions. This is all based around Nix, which is one reason why this machine is running NixOS (the main reason is because NixOS makes sysadmin much easier).
If Hydra’s running, it will provide a localhost-only Web interface on port 3000. This shows the current status of each project, whether anything’s being built right now, etc.
The helper scripts start-hydra.sh and stop-hydra.sh are provided in /home/user for turning Hydra on and off, as well hydra-restart.sh to restart it if it’s “stuck” (i.e. when there are builds in the queue, but none is being run). hydra-loop.sh will run hydra-restart.sh periodically.
Another use for this machine is benchmarking experiments. The projects being benchmarked are those in the ‘te’ (Theory Exploration) category in Hydra.
We don’t actually use Hydra to run benchmarks, since we want each benchmark to have the whole machine to itself (as far as practical), whilst we want Hydra to build as much as possible in parallel (we have multiple cores, after all).
Hence we usually run benchmarks from individual git checkouts in /home/user, and the projects themselves tend to use ASV for benchmarking. We also stop Hydra whilst benchmarks are running.
The scripts I use to access this machine are managed in this repository. The canonical URL for this repo is http://chriswarbo.net/git/desktop-scripts but there should be a mirror at https://github.com/Warbo/desktop-scripts
Most of this machine’s configuration should be done through the /etc/nixos/configuration.nix file. This is also managed in this repository, and that path on the machine is actually just a symlink to a git checkout of this repo stored in /home/user.