Project Work Plan & Status

Outline Schedule

Stage 1 - Documentation

Period: 17/09 - 30/09 (2 weeks)

Outline of tasks:

• Investigate, understand and document (where no existing documentation exists) the existing mechanisms and systems
• Review potential successor(s) to AIMS, publishing findings through twiki

Stage 2 - Requirements Listings

Period: 01/10 - 14/10 (2 weeks)

Outline of tasks:

• Discuss existing requirements list with group
• Expand current list where applicable
• Prioritise requirements list

Stage 3 - Design Stage

Period: 15/10 - 04/11 (3 weeks)

Outline of tasks:

• Produce design specification of new system and make case for tool selection

Stage 4 - Tool selection

Period: 05/11 - 11/11 (1 week)

A lot of overlap with Stage 3

Stage 5 - (Prototype)Build period

Period: 12/11 - 25/11

Stage 6 - Group Peer Review

In Progress

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Upcoming Tasks

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Completed

• Design specification listing.
• A comparison of the potential ways to go. A look at the functions and features of AIMS with PrepareInstall, AII (version 1 and 2) and Cobbler.
• Early cgi template for integration wth SSO mechanism
• (in very simple terns, urllib2 with basic authentication headers to identify self, accesses SSO and extracts results from XML based on query parsed)
• More detailed design specification in progress, with intended of presented to group at the end of the week =s (still pending in some areas)
• Discussions with network guys about LanDB API (extracting systems and ownership, updating operating system etc)
• Further analysis of requirements list with section members
• Mapping of solution to requirements list
• Exploration of e-groups/CRA. Is there a solution to authorisation/authentication here?
  • E-groups will be released at the end of the week but there is no integration with CRA. Estimated 12 months. This is too long.
• Further Cobbler testing
• Further Cobbler code reading
• Analysing existing AIMS implementation
  • PXELINUX configurations
  • eLilo configurations
  • LanDB client
  • AIMS client/commands
    • PrepareInstall
      • Code Reading
      • Getting to gripes with SOAP
      • CVS monitoring
      • PXE OFF setting
      • Code reading: simple SSH packaging

• Reviewing cobbler
  • Documenting (twiki) features and functionality
  • Prelim testing of Cobbler latest release
  • Prelim configuration and testing of WebUI
  • Koan testing
  • Dependency testing (python-cheetah)
  • Touch base with Cobbler development team

Things to note

Overview of Testing

The quick test is to see how far Cobbler and Koan get with the following:

Support all Kernels and Images

• x86
• x86_64

• Fedora
• SLC3
• SLC4
• SLC5??
• 5Server
• 3ES, 4ES
• utilities (death disk etc)
• WinXP (32, 64 bit)
• bit (386, x86_64)