This is a page that explains how to use Chef to bring up Windows on DETER.

NOTE: work in progress - do not actually do this yet.

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• checkout the containers source tree
• switch to the configdb branch
• swap in an experiment with physical nodes loaded with the PNODE-BASE image.
• ssh to a pnode
• cd [path to containers]/bin
• run ./chef_configure.sh
• edit the file /tmp/nodes.conf, which describes the nodes you want to spawn. The file format is below.
• run ./spawn_windows.sh and wait a long time (like 5 minutes per container).

nodes.conf format and description:

nodes:
      - name: nodeOne
        image_name: deter/win7
        url: http://scratch/benito/deter_win7.box
        data_address: 10.1.1.100
        data_bridge: eth4

      - name: nodeTwo
        image_name: deter/win7
        url: http://scratch/benito/deter_win7.box
        data_address: 10.1.1.101
        data_bridge: eth4

...

nodes.conf description:

• name: the hostname of the new node
• image_name: the Vagrant name - this should be unique per image (*not* host, image)
• url: the URL to the container image
• data_address: the ip address of the container. Should really be in same subnet as host
• data_bridge - the interface to bridge the data address to from the container to the host.
• control_addr - [optional and experimental] the ip address for the container on the control network (172.16.x.x)
• control_bridge - [optional and experimental] - the host interface to bridge to the container's control address.

If you add an address you must add a bridge.

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The Windows nodes will spawn and Chef will configure them. Currently Vagrant uses VirtualBox? shared folders to mount user directories from the pnode host. Chef creates the accounts on the machines correctly, but they do not show up until the Windows containers are rebooted. to reboot them sudo to root (sudo su -), cd to /space/vagrant and run vagrant reload. This will cleanly shutdown the machines and bring them up again. This takes forever. There is support for parallel operations in vagrant, but not for booting Virtualboxes though. Which is a pain.

This reboot is currently in the bootstrap_containers recipe in cookbooks/win-node/recipe/bootstrap_containers.rb in the chef-repo. If we solve the accounts-need-reboot problem, remove the reload from this recipe.

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There are millions of other little details and one of them will probably go pear-shaped when you attempt to run this. email/talk/chat/IM/IRC Geoff when you hit a snag.