Building an ORBIT Testbed

This page documents the steps necessary to build an ORBIT testbed.

We need to add some more text here, but right now we are just collecting various bits and pieces and I hope somebody will do some Wiki gardening when it gets unwieldy.

Support Services

• PXE — Bootstrap Orbit nodes

PXE

To bootstrap the testbed nodes, in fact any server in the system, we use ​PXE to have the nodes load an image which contains a nodeagent and a ​frisbee client. However, to use PXE we first need to install a ​TFTP server from which PXE get's its information and the image itself. The TFPT server needs to be installed on a server machine which is reachable

Installing a TFTP server

This should go away as we should make a dependency on the orbit-pxe-server package.

Installing PXE image

The PXE client gets the address of the TFTP server through DHCP. Taking it's IP address it attempts to download a specific file containing further instructions from the TFPT server. The name of the file is created from the PXE client's IP address. For Orbit, the instructions are identical for every node and are stored in "/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default.orbit-version". This file instructs the node to fetch the image "/tftpboot/initrd-orbit-pxe-version.img" from the TFTP server and boot into it.

Both files will be installed through:

% apt-get install orbit-pxe-server

DHCP