If you don’t care about Talos performance results, or Talos hardware, stop reading now!

Its been a hectic couple of weeks on the Talos front since my last post. Here’s a quick summary of whats been going on:

In RelEng, we’re using this recalibration as a chance to cleanup a few long-standing details of how Talos slaves are configured. These changes to the Talos ref images include:

  • setting up these new machines in the Build network, with the rest of the build machines, not in the QA network, where Talos has been running since its inception. This will allow us to clean up some VPN and firewall configurations within the colo.
  • changing accounts on Talos machines to be consistent with all the other build machines
  • making sure configuration management software is installed.
  • bumping up OS versions, which have been intentionally been unchanged since 2007!:
    • OSX10.4: we’re leaving on old machines for now. From initial glance, this doesnt work on the new minis, and is already de-supported on mozilla-central, so we might end up just leaving it. More on this as it emerges.

    • OSX10.5: upgraded from 10.5.2 to 10.5.8.
    • WinXP: no OS change
    • WinVista: replaced with Win7
    • ubuntu7: replaced with fedora12 (32bit)
    • ubuntu 64bit: replaced with fedora12 (64bit)

In IT:

  • The first batch of 100 minis arrived just before New Years. Last week, Matthew and Phong (with a little help from aki, jhford and myself) spent a day unboxing, removing wrappers, sorting power cables, putting on asset tags, scanning serial numbers, etc, etc, etc. Scroll down for photos!

  • the racks were delivered, installed and cabled. Also power upgraded and air conditioning prep’d by middle of last week.
  • as ref images were completed, and tested in staging, use them to image a set of minis.

As of Friday evening, 60 of the new slaves are imaged using the new OSX10.5.8, WinXP and Win7 reference images, racked and powered.

In the coming week, we’ll:

  • have the remaining 40 imaged with linux32, linux64.

  • schedule a downtime to have all these new slaves enabled in production, along side the existing production slaves.

    If all goes well, after about 2 weeks, we’ll take the old systems out of production, and declare that first phase done. Stay tuned for more details.

    (If you’ve read this far, and have questions about anything that I’ve missed, please let me know.)