2 Build Client Management

The i386™, alpha, amd64, and two Sparc64® clients currently netboot from pointyhat; the other sparc64 client and ia64 clients are self-hosted. In all cases they set themselves up at boot-time to prepare to build packages.

In the latest round of portbuild updates, disconnected cluster node support has been added. A disconnected node is one that does not mount the cluster master via NFS. It could be a remote node, for example. The cluster master rsync's the interesting data (ports, src, and doc trees, bindist tarballs, scripts, etc.) to disconnected nodes during the node-setup phase. Then, the disconnected portbuild directory is nullfs-mounted for chroot builds.

The ports-${arch} user can ssh(1) as root onto each of the ${arch} nodes.

The scripts/allgohans script can be used to run a command on all of the ${arch} clients.

The scripts/checkmachines script is used to monitor the load on all the nodes of the build cluster, and schedule which nodes build which ports. This script is not very robust, and has a tendency to die. It is best to start up this script on the build master (either pointyhat or dosirak) after boot time using a while(1) loop.