Automatic deployment part 2

So I've installed a Hudson server on one of my virtual machines. It was a snap. Just followed the instructions.

I started to work on Ant build script for one of the projects and figured out following. Aptana Studio 2 doesn't have Ant build as I was used to in Eclipse. I downloaded Eclispe and installed all necessary components for me to find out that installation went bad. Snow Leopard's default Ant does not have optional tasks. No way I was able to enable them.

The solution I opted for was to use MacPorts with Porticus and istalled all Ant related features. After that I ran fetch.xml build script as instructed in installation manual and I have Ant 1.8.1 fully functional.

Automatic deployment part 1

I want to have a deployment process not to be manual anymore. After research I settled for Hudson as an deployment server and I am heading towards continuous integration. I am not sure at the moment if Subversion is righ CRM for the task and thinking of switching to Git. Deploy scripts are to be written in Ant.

The process as I think of is following. Programmers will work on their working copies of projects. Once they are satisfied with progress they commit to the trunk of CRM for the project. Hudson picks up the commit and starts deployment using Ant build script of the project to the testing server. Once we reach set of features and stability required, we mark build as staging ready and Hudson will pick it up and replay it to the staging server to see if the build on production will be functional. If so we mark the build as production build and let Hudson to replay it to the production environment.

There is many things which bothers me. Our projects are usually dependent on other projects of ours. One change in a DB backend required for one project affects few other projects. Deployment needs to account for that. Also tagging in Subversion seems to be a headache to put in symbiosis with Hudson.

VMware Tools and Ubuntu 9.10 problems

With update of VMware ESXi 4.0 to VMware Hypervisor 4.1 I had to reinstall all vmware-tools on all my Ubuntu 9.10 virtual machines. There was no way for me to figure out why it does run on one of them automagically and not on any other machine.

I googled the internet left and right and no help. So I decided to figure out the thing by myself. The thing is that there was a link missing for start-up script. So here is the whole thing needed to be done:

cd /etc/rcS.d
sudo ln -s ../init.d/vmware-tools S38vmware-tools

After that everything works OK again.

VMWare...

Recently I went from using stand alone machines to VMWare ESXi server. It gives me much more flexibility. We purchased HP ML350 with 16GB Ram and one processor so far. Will try to upgrade it soon.

Anyway, the first major thing was, I didn't want to install new machine from the scratch over and over. We have several Ubuntu servers and I just needed one install which I would reuse as a base for different servers.

The way to do it in ESXi is:

1. Prepare one virtual machine for cloning. In my case it was to make a basic installation of Ubuntu server. Don't forget to install VMWare Tools, so you don't have to do it for each of your clones later.
   
2. Then go to your datastare and make a directory for a new virtual machine. Go back to the directory of your Ubutu server installation from previous step. Copy all *.wmx and *.wmdk files over to your new directory.
3. When done go to the new directory, right click on *.wmx file and choose "Add to Inventory". Finish the wizard.
4. Start your new virtual machine.
5. Go to console and edit /etc/hostname file to have the name you want your virtual machine to have.
6. Go to console and edit /etc/hosts. Change hostname from the name of your cloned machine to the one form previous step.
   
7. Go to console and edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules You just need to comment first line and change eth1 to eth0 in the second line.
8. In console edit /etc/network/interfaces and change IP of your machine.
   

After those steps your "cloned" virtual machine is ready. Now you can install whatever software you need for the particular case.

iPhone menace....

OK. SO it is next 12 hours (in which I slept for some 7 hours). While I was using the phone in other 5 hours (for some 30 minutes), iPhone rebooted on me 3 additional times, once in a phone call....
I am finding the device unsatisfactory and calling provider to replace it with any BB model... It is not worth my time....