[talk] Creating a test lab for OpenSource Operating Systems

[Pete Wright]

On 11/20/14 11:33, Christos Zoulas wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I was asked by George to post here. Some folks at NetBSD have been
> toying with the idea to provide a set of test machines that are
> internet accessible for testing, performance, and comparison
> purposes. Since we (NetBSD) don't have any more hosting space
> available, we are asking if nycbug is interested in hosting such
> a beast.
>
> The idea is to have a bunch of machines with identical hardware
> running different OS's (Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Illumos, etc.) so
> that we can compare performance and behavior. We would probably
> make the machines netboot standardized images, and people could
> reserve time on them to do their work. When the work is completed
> people would check the machines back to the pool and any local
> changes would be destroyed.
>
> NetBSD can provide some of the hardware (there are lots of decent
> machines on E-bay for not a lot of money).
>
> I think that having such as setup would be useful to people for
> interoperatibility, compatibility and performance testing.
>

Hi Christos,
	I think this is a great idea and would be keen to assist where 
possible.  I can see lots of benefit in this arena as well for not just 
OS's but the management tools for managing heterogenous environments. 
For example - I use cobbler quite extensively to manage my pxe 
environments, but I rarely have to support more than RedHat and FreeBSD 
systems.  So having a lab like this could really benefit the cobbler 
project to ensure support for Net/Open/Dragonfly BSD as well as Illumos 
is up to snuff.

Keep me in the loop!

Cheers,
-pete


-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
twitter => @nomadlogicLA