the original article written in Japanese)
This article shows how to prepare a Live USB stick that becomes a Hudson slave automatically, by using the Hudson swarm plugin.
Ingredients
Hardware
- PC that supports USB boot
- USB stick (at least 512MB, but depends on the projects to build. I used 8GB)
- Functioning DCHP server on the network
Software
Formatting USB stick
Format a USB stick with VFAT. The drive needs to have enough space for performing builds.
Installing Slax
Slax is a modern, portable, small and fast Linux operating system with a modular approach and outstanding design. It can be directly booted from a CD or an USB drive. It's based on Slackware, and uses unionfs so that the resulting system is writable (backed by memory, thus without touching HDDs in the system.)
Use of USB stick allows us to boot a Hudson slave without modifying the HDDs in the system, and configurations can be persisted.
First, loop-mount an ISO file and copies files to a USB disk.
nanaka # mount -o loop slax-6.1.1-2.iso /mnt/floppy/
nanaka # cd /mnt/floppy
nanaka floppy # ls -la
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 2048 2009-04-29 14:59 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 2009-06-07 09:29 ..
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 2009-04-18 16:39 boot
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 2009-04-18 17:10 slax
nanaka floppy # cp -a boot slax /media/disk (/media/disk is tge USB stick)
Run boot/bootinst.sh to set up MBR on the USB stick.
nanaka disk # cd /media/disk/boot
nanaka boot # ./bootinst.sh
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Welcome to Slax boot installer
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This installer will setup disk /dev/sdb1 to boot only Slax.
Warning! Master boot record (MBR) of /dev/sdb will be overwritten.
If you use /dev/sdb to boot any existing operating system, it will not work
anymore. Only Slax will boot from this device. Be careful!
Press any key to continue, or Ctrl+C to abort...
Flushing filesystem buffers, this may take a while...
Setting up MBR on /dev/sdb...
The Master Boot Record of /dev/sdb has been updated.
Activating partition /dev/sdb1...
No partition table modifications are needed.
Updating MBR on /dev/sdb...
Setting up boot record for /dev/sdb1...
Disk /dev/sdb1 should be bootable now. Installation finished.
Read the information above and then press any key to exit...
This completes a USB-bootable Slax.
Installing JDK
To start a Hudson swarm plugin, we need a JDK. Slax already has a module jdk-6u11-i586-1pst.lzm, so we'll install this.
With Slax, one only needs to place modules to slax/modules directory, and they'll be automatically made available upon boot.
nanaka #cp jdk-6u11-i586-1pst.lzm /media/disk/slax/modules/
If 6u11 is too old for you, non-official package of 6u14 is available from here for your convenience.
At this point, boot from USB and continue configuration from Slax. A successful boot should result in a KDE environment:
User Account
Create an user account that runs the Hudson swarm client. We could just use root for this, but we'll create the 'hudson' user in the 'hudson' group:
root@slax:~# addgroup hudson
root@slax:~# useradd -g hudson -d /home/hudson -s /bin/bash hudson
root@slax:~# mkdir /home/hudson
root@slax:~# chown hudson:hudson /home/hudson
Installing Hudson Swarm Slave
Put the swarm client in /home/hudson and create fsrot:
root@slax:~# su - hudson
hudson@slax:~$ mkdir fsroot
hudson@slax:~$ ls
fsroot/ swarm-client-1.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar
Auto-starting Swarm Client
Modify /etc/rc.d/rc.local to start the swarm client automatically upon boot:
root@slax:~# cat /etc/rc.d/rc.local
#!/bin/sh
#
# /etc/rc.d/rc.local: Local system initialization script.
#
# Put any local startup commands in here. Also, if you have
# anything that needs to be run at shutdown time you can
# make an /etc/rc.d/rc.local_shutdown script and put those
# commands in there.
USER=hudson
USER_HOME=/home/${USER}
CLIENT=${USER_HOME}/swarm-client-1.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar
LOG=${USER_HOME}/hudson.log
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/java
# Swarm client option
DESCRIPTION="SLAX Live-USB"
EXECUTORS=2
FSROOT=${USER_HOME}/fsroot
LABELS="Swarm"
hudson_start() {
if [ -e ${CLIENT} ]; then
/bin/su - "${USER}" \
-c \
"${JAVA_HOME}/bin/java -jar \"${CLIENT}\" \
-description \"${DESCRIPTION}\" \
-executors \"${EXECUTORS}\" \
-fsroot \"${FSROOT}\" \
-labels \"${LABELS}\" \
> \"${LOG}\" 2>&1 &"
fi
}
hudson_start
Similarly, tweak /etc/rc.d/rc.local_shutdown to terminate the swam client and clean up log files, etc.
root@slax:~# cat /etc/rc.d/rc.lo
rc.local rc.local_shutdown
root@slax:~# cat /etc/rc.d/rc.local_shutdown
#!/bin/sh
#
USER=hudson
USER_HOME=/home/${USER}
LOG=${USER_HOME}/hudson.log
FSROOT=${USER_HOME}/fsroot
hudson_stop() {
PID=`ps ax | grep swarm-client | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $1 }'`
if [ -n "${PID}" ]; then
/bin/kill "${PID}" > /dev/null 2>&1
fi
if [ -e "${LOG}" ]; then
/bin/rm "${LOG}" > /dev/null 2>&1
fi
for jar in "${FSROOT}"/maven*.jar ; do
/bin/rm "${jar}" > /dev/null 2>&1
done
}
hudson_stop
Verify That Everything Works
Start the swarm client and make sure that everything works as expected.
root@slax:~# /etc/rc.d/rc.local
root@slax:~# ps aux | grep swarm
hudson 14414 9.4 1.2 662988 25576 pts/1 Sl 19:47 0:00 /usr/lib/java/bin/java -jar /home/hudson/swarm-client-1.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar -description SLAX Live-USB -executors 2 -fsroot /home/hudson/fsroot -labels Swarm
root 14465 0.0 0.0 2972 824 pts/1 S+ 19:48 0:00 grep swarm
Verify that the client is connected by looking at the Hudson node management scren:
And its configuration screen:
Now shut down the system. Don't remove the USB stick until the system is fully halted.
Inspecting the USB Stick
Bring the USB back to another system to take a look at what's inside.
sogabe@nanaka ~/Desktop $ cd /media/disk/
sogabe@nanaka /media/disk $ ls
boot slax
sogabe@nanaka /media/disk $ cd slax/
sogabe@nanaka /media/disk/slax $ ls
GNU_GPL base cheatcodes.txt livecd.sgn make_iso.sh optional rootcopy tools
LICENSE changes images make_iso.bat modules requirements.txt slaxsave.zip xino
sogabe@nanaka /media/disk/slax $ cd changes/
sogabe@nanaka /media/disk/slax/changes $ ls
dev etc home lib mnt opt root tmp usr var
sogabe@nanaka /media/disk/slax/changes $ cd home/hudson
sogabe@nanaka /media/disk/slax/changes/home/hudson $ ls
fsroot swarm-client-1.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar
You can see that slax/changes contains files that we just created above. If further changes are necessary, just modify these files. Slax also copies all the files in slax/rootcopy into the real '/' upon boot, so for example if you want /home/hudson/fsroot after booth, you can create slax/rootcopy/home/hudson/fsroot in the USB stick.
This completes the Live USB version of the Hudson swarm client. Slax makes it really easy to do this.]]>
