[Labs-l] Problems when setting up an instance of Wikidata

Tue Apr 17 14:14:14 UTC 2012

Hi all

We have today tried to set up an instance for wikidata, namely "wikidata-dev-1"
in the "wikidata" project. We have run into several issues - some are merely
things that appear unclear, others seem genuinely misswing or broken. I'll try
to be brief in my descriptions in order to provide an overview. You can ask me
or reedy for details.

So, here goes:

* UNCLEAR: Which image (ubuntu version) should be used (when trying to be close
to the live environment)? Why are the different versions there? And why is there
both "oneric" and "oneiric"?

* MISSING: apparently, the security groups (firewall rule sets) for an instance
can not be changed after it was created.

* MISSING/UNCLEAR: We will want to create our own puppet scripts for setting up
wikidata repos for testing, etc. Where do we need to submit them? How would we
apply them to instances?

* MISSING: it would be very convenient to be save "profiles" for setting up new
instances - profiles would just be the puppet config for that instance.
Alternatively, allow a new instances to be created "configured just like that
one over there".

* MISSING: foll VM snapshots. But that's just "nice to have". Puppet templates
would be much more useful.

* BROKEN: We were unable to install a mysql server. Trying to apply db:core
failed with an error. The error ocurrs when trying ot restart the ganglia
monitoring daemon (gmon or whatever). It complains about a syntax error
(unexpected token "}") in the config file.

* BROKEN: Actually, installing mysql (db:core) initially failed with a different
error: it's missing the directory /a. If that dir is needed, the puppet script
should create it, no?

* UNCLEAR: after changing the puppet config for an instance, when are the
changes applied? We ended up running puppetd -tv manually from the shell...
shouldn't the console just trigger that whenever the config is changes?

* MISSING/UNCLEAR: some puppet bundles are incompatible with each other. Trying
to install all of apache2 and apache2:php5 and apache2:php5-mysql fails with an
unhelpful error message about conflicting declarations. So, dependencies and
conflicts between bundles should somehow be indicated (or at least there should
be meaningful messages on the console).

* UNCLEAR: which are the bundles needed to install a standard LAMP stack?

* MISSING: we were not able to find out reliably when an instance has finished
booting. It would be helpful to at least have a big message in the console
output. Just put a big "READY TO ROLL" in there. Well, ideally, the status in
the instance list should be "booting", not "running", until it's fully up.

We'd be very grateful for any input on the above issues. As it stands, we'll be
using labs as a plain VM hoster, and install everything by hand. Which kind of
sucks...

Thanks
Daniel