492629 - Update existing 5 ref image minis to be new pool-of-talos-slaves ref image minis

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Release Engineering :: General, defect)

Description

[John O'Duinn [:joduinn] (please use "needinfo?" flag)]

1) Please image 5 mac minis (one per o.s.) using the current talos ref images specified here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=476100#c5
(vague, I know, but...).

2) Power these up so we can edit and update these machines briefly. 

3) Once we have finished updating them, we can then power down. These machines will then become the new ref platform for any future pool-of-talos-slaves requests.

Comment 1

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

Is the idea to dedicate these machines to this, or image to portable hardrive and update on a more ad-hoc basis ?

Comment 2

[John O'Duinn [:joduinn] (please use "needinfo?" flag)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Is the idea to dedicate these machines to this, or image to portable hardrive
> and update on a more ad-hoc basis ?

Originally, yes, based on discussions with Alice earlier today, this was to avoid touching existing 5 mac minis already being used for ref images. It seemed simplest to just redo what we had already been doing, and then clean up later. 

However, after further chat with Alice, and then Phong, here is a change of plan.

1) The existing Talos qm-ref-* machines are currently already copied out to disk images, which Phong uses to reimage existing non-pooled talos machines. Phong confirmed these disk images are what he already uses when reimaging talos machines, and they work fine.

2) The existing Talos qm-ref-* machines can now be updated with changes to apache.conf, buildbot, etc in order to become "new" talos ref images for the new pool-of-talos-slaves machines. 

3) Once we are ready, Phong can create new additional disk images of these new ref images. We can then free up these 5 qm-ref-* machines, as they are of the same 1.83ghz CPU vintage. 

4) In the future, if we need to change/update any Talos ref image, Phong can setup a mac mini (or 5!) with a clean image from these diskimages, let RelEng update the mac mini, and then Phong can recreate the disk image. This is true for either the old dedicated-talos-slave refimage or the pool-o-talos-slave refimage. This does make changing a ref image a little more complicated, (a problem before when changes happened frequently). However, in recent months, this has happened very very rarely, so it feels ok.

So, I'll morph this bug summary and reassign it back to RelEng.

Comment 3

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

Was this supposed to go in Server Ops?

Comment 4

[Chris AtLee [:catlee]]

Nope, this is for me.

Comment 5

[Chris AtLee [:catlee]]

Ok, qm-ref-* machines have been updated.

Phong, can you create new disk images from these machines?  These should be kept separate from the existing talos images for now.  We will refer to these new images as the "pooled slave" images, or something along those lines.

Comment 6

[Phong Tran [:phong]]

All 5 new Talos-rev-<OS>-ref images taken.