perfSONAR QA testbed

This reposiory and this README file contain instructions and playbook to maintain perfSONAR hosts to participate to the perfSONAR Quality Assurance testbed. We will assume Ansible knowledge and previous experience with perfSONAR, our generic Ansible playbook and roles.

Contributions

If you want to use this setup and be part of our QA testbed, please contact us explaining us how you want to help and what are the resources you can dedicate. Thank you.

Preparing your setup

Once you have dedicated resources to commit to the perfSONAR QA testbed, use the following instructions.

Prepare your Ansible controller

The playbook relies on some roles being present on your Ansible controller. You can install them with a regular:

ansible-galaxy install -r  requirements.yml

Create and provision your hosts

You'll need to have machines ready with a basic OS install and an adminitration user (i.e. either root or a regular user with sudo/su access). Machines need to be reachable from your Ansible controller (the host where you'll be running the playbook contained in this repository). For ease of management, the default setup will create a psadmin user on each machine and add ssh keys to grant access to your team.

Add your hosts to inventory

1. Add your hosts in the Ansible inventory (inventory/hosts by default) and create a group for your organisation (ex: qalab). It's probably best to define a short name for your host in your group with the FQDN or IP as ansible_host.
2. Then add your hosts (short names) in the perfSONAR category you will assign them, this is usually either ps_testpoint or ps_toolkit and choose one of the perfsonar_release you want to assign them to (take a look inside inventory/group_vars/ps_installer.yml to know the different options, it depends on the distro your host is running).

Configure variables

Look into the various variables files in the inventory file and directory and adapt to your deployment. Of particular interest are:

• in inventory/hosts:
  • ansible_user and ansible_become_user: depending on your setup
• in inventory/group_vars/all.yml:
  • psadmin_user_keys: public ssh keys of individuals accessing the testbed hosts
  • to keep secret: psadmin_password but the psadmin is also granted sudo access without password. Note that if this is None, the psadmin account will not be created at all.
• from inventory/group_vars/ps_archive.yml:
  • perfsonar_archive_auth_list add the IPs of your hosts to the list and push it to the git repository.
• in inventory/group_vars/ps_testpoint.yml:
  • perfsonar_ntp_servers a good set of NTP servers for your hosts
• in inventory/group_vars/ps_toolkit.yml:
  • to keep secret: perfsonar_web_passwd

Prometheus monitoring

To be added.

First run of the playbook

After configuring the different variables, you can run the full playbook with something like one of the folowings (depending on your setup accessing your new hosts):

ansible-playbook site.yml -l qalab
ansible-playbook -u your_user -K site.yml -l qalab
ansible-playbook -u your_user -K -e bootstrap_user=your_user site.yml -l qalab

If you don't want to run the bootstrapping or provisioning part, exclude the corresponding tag from your run with something like:

ansible-playbook --skip-tags bootstrap site.yml -l qalab

Sharing our deployments

There are 2 files that need to be shared back and forth between the different Ansible controlers:

• inventory/hosts as this list all hosts that are part of the mesh so we know what we can expect
• inventory/group_vars/ps_archive.yml that contains the list of IP/ranges that should be authorised to post to the central archive

Once your deployment is ready, please post an updated version of those files to this same reposiory.

Maintenance of your setup

Once the initial run has been done, you shouldn't need to run the playbook again. But it is indempotent and you can run it again without worry.

Notes

In case you need a reference, the perfSONAR hosts management part of the setup described here is coming from our regular perfSONAR Ansible playbook.

Set up individual host variables with the lsregistration.yml template

mkdir inventory/host_vars/myhostname
cp roles/ansible-role-perfsonar-testpoint/defaults/lsregistration.yml \
  inventory/host_vars/myhostname
vi inventory/host_vars/myhostname/lsregistration.yml

Run the playbook:

ansible-playbook perfsonar.yml

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Some useful commands to manage the environment

Use Ansible ping to verify connectivity to targets:

ansible all -m ping