ability to log into slaves from the master

[ipv6guru]

I run a buildmaster. Lots of people donate slaves (since our goal is to test basically every major version of every OS on every architecture, this really is rather a few). Most slave admins put about 1 hour into setting things up once, and then forget about it afterwards.

The problem comes when something changes that requires tweaking on the slaves -- this is probably a bit more common for us than others since we're using a VCS that's under heavy development, but it can also perfectly well happen with changes in build environment needed, etc. Basically, every time something like this happens, I have a bunch of hassle working out a clear set of failure-proof instructions to send to all the slave contributors, and then I have to nag them to actually get around to following them, and then in the end we still end up losing some percentage of slaves each time.

So, I would like a way to just log in interactively to the slave account, from the master.

The ideal interface would probably be an ssh server inside the master; this gives both reasonable security (ssh knows about passwords), and a good UI (ssh knows about running shells; compare trying to do this with some sort of shell-prompt-inside-a-web-browser or something). Or, you know, telnet, or whatever, if that's easier. Using telnet would require that it listen on a local port only, for security, but that's probably a reasonable configuration in any case.

I'd imagine it being set up something like: cshellPortnum? = 1234 cshellPassword? = "s3kr1t"

Then the use would involve just telnet'ing or ssh'ing to that port, giving the password, and then I guess seeing a list of slaves, type one of their names, and poof, a shell?

Submitted: Nathaniel Smith ( njs ) - 2006-05-11 03:58

[dustin]

This is hard - especially if Windows is to be supported - but a very cool idea