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This forces all metadata values to be plain text values for now.

variables are setup before writing them!

greater the 512K is automatically compressed with gzip. Might need to
make this number bigger; we shall see.

If you run emacs, put this in your .emacs file.

	(load "jka-compr")
	(jka-compr-install)

and any time you visit a file that ends in one of the standard compression
extensions, emacs will automatically do the uncompress for you on the data
in the buffer (not the actual disk file of course). Very convenient.

You can also get your browser to do the same, but I leave that as an
exercise for the reader.

not swapped in (equiv of plain experiment preload), and then swapped
in later. This fulfills flyspray request FS#100.

trying to start two runs at a times. Nothing special, only one
operation at a time.

(initial) parameters for a new run. Three choices right now; from the
template itself, from the instance, or from the previous run. On the
web interface this is presented as three buttons. On ops, it is the
the -y option, which takes one of template,instance,lastrun as its
argument (you can of course combine the -y option with an XML file to
override specific params).

At present, there is no default. Lets give it a chance to sink in
before I pick something that will annoy 50% of the people 75% of the
time.

time a run starts. This info is stored in the DB forever, but a file
in the archive is a nice thing too.

instance being replayed, not the template itself.

* New version of template_record just for ops, since so much is
  different about ops, not bothering to maintain a single version.

* Various fixes to how the recorded events are stored and reconstituted.
  The big fix is to wrap them in a sequence to that they get fired
  properly (waiting for completion of previous event in recording).

* New buttons to Pause and Continue event time, which is used when
  adding recorded events. This allows users to pause time while they
  "think" so when an event is recorded, the thinking time is not actually
  in the timeline. Eventually hope to figure this out automatically, but
  that will take some real, uh, thinking.

* Add a new event editor (linked off the template page) that allows
  you to delete and change the recordings. Note that you can only edit
  the events at the template level; you cannot edit the events of an
  instance (swapped in experiment), and you can only edit the recorded
  events, not any other events. Not sure its useful to be able to do
  either of these yet, but probably not too hard to add at some point.

* Copy template datastore to instance "datastore" directory, instead of
  "template_datastore" ... avoid mass confusion.

* Change xxx:// mappping from template datastore to the instance datastore.

inserted for regular experiments as well as template instances.

* Create a per-experiment DB user for the per-experiment DB; the user
  name is equal to the DB name.

* Add a dpdbpassword field to the experiments table; this is the
  randomly generated password for the DB user mentioned above.

* For Templates, use the above user/password in the environment,
  instead of the swapper uid/password.

* Add experiment dbname/dbpassword to the Show Experiment page.

phases of a run. Eventually we want to remove dead nodes from
consideration, but this will do for now.

  info so we have a record of it.

* First attempt at dealing with nodes that do not respond to the
  synchronous events that are sent from start and stop run. Rather
  then failing, attempt to figure out which nodes are actually dead,
  and save some state in the DB associated with the run. The current
  method for figuring out which nodes are dead is the node_status
  table, since the event scheduler is the only thing that knows what
  nodes did not respond. Will probably revisit this very soon.

* Bug fixes of course.

* Start implementing a Run object so replace some of the code in the
  Instance object.

doing a Start Run. On the web page, there is a new checkbox, and
on ops, template_startrun takes a new -m option.

Caveat: You cannot specify a new NS file, yet. The original file is
reparsed, and the idea is that a change in the template parameters
will result in a change to the topology. I will add the ability to
specify a new NS file in the next revision of this change.

If you really really want to change the NS file, go to
/proj/$pid/exp/$eid/archive/nsdata and edit nsfile.ns ...

In addtion, DATASTORE is now defined while parsing the NS file. This
turned to be quite the headache!

it got more complicated as it progressed.

The bulk of the change was changing template_exprun so that it can take a
pid/eid as an alternative to eid/guid. This is a big convenience since its
easy to find the template from a running experiment, and it makes it
possible to invoke from the event scheduler, which has never heard of a
template before (and its not something I wanted to teach it about).  Its
also easier on users.

Anyway, back to the stoprun event. You can now do this:

	$ns at 100 "$ns stoprun"
or
	tevc -e pid/eid now ns stoprun

You can add the -w option to wait for the completion event that is sent,
but this brings me to the glaring problems with this whole thing.

* First, the scheduler has to fire off the stoprun in the background,
  since if it waits, we get deadlock. Why? Cause the implementation of
  stoprun uses the event system (SNAPSHOT event, other things), and if
  the scheduler is sitting and waiting, nothing happens.

  Okay, the solution to this was to generate a COMPLETION event from
  template_exprun once the stop operation is complete. This brings me
  to the second problem ...

* Worse, is that the "ns" events that are sent to implement stoprun (like
  snapshot) send their own completion events, and that confuses anyone
  waiting on the original stoprun event (it returns early).

  So what to do about this? There is a "token" field in the completion
  event structure, which I presume is to allow you to match things up.  But
  there is no way to set this token using tevc (and then wait for it), and
  besides, the event scheduler makes them up anyway and sticks them into
  the event. So, the seed of a fix are already germinating in my mind, but
  I wanted to get this commit in so that Mike would have fun reading this
  commit log.

so that users can schedule program events to run there. For example:

	set myprog [new Program $ns]
	$myprog set node "ops"
	$myprog set command "/usr/bin/env >& /tmp/foo"

	$ns at 10 "$myprog start"
or
	tevc -e pid/eid now myprog start

Since the program agent cannot talk to tmcd from ops, there are new
routines to create the config files that the program agent uses, in
the expertment tbdata directory.

I also rewrote the eventsys.proxy script that starts the event
scheduler on ops; I rolled the startup of the program agent into this
script, via new -a option which is passed over from boss when an ops
program agent is detected in the virt topology. This keep the number
of new processes on ops to a small number.

Also part of the above rewrite is that we now catch when event
scheduler (or the program agent) exits abnormally, sending email to
tbops and the swapper of the experiment. We have been seeing abnormal
exits of the scheduler and it would good to detect and see if we can
figure out what is going wrong.

Other small bug fixes in experiment run.

* Add XMLRPC interface for template swapin,stoprun,startrun,swapout and
  add the appropriate wrappers to the script_wrapper on ops.

* Allow parameter descriptions in NS files. This is probably not in its
  final form since its a bit confusing as to what has priority; something
  in the NS file or a metadata item. Anyway, you can do this in your NS
  file:

	$ns define-template-parameter GUID "0/0" "The GUID to be analyzed"

  The rules are currently that the NS file description has priority and
  is copied to child templates, unless the user has modified a description
  via the web interface, in which case the NS file description is ignored.
  I know, sounds awful, but for the most part people are going to use the
  NS file anyway.

* Add "clear" option when starting a new experiment run; the per
  experiment DB at the logholes are cleared. Note that this is *not* the
  default behaviour; you have to either check the checkbox on the web form
  or use the -c option to the script wrapper, or clear=yes if talking
  directly to the XMLRPC server.

* Fix up how email is generated for template_swapin and template_create,
  so that Kevin can debug tblog/tbreport stuff, but also so that we maintain
  mail logs as before. I have made some improvements to libaudit so as to
  centralize the mail goo, and avoid duplicating all that stuff.

* Minor fixes to the program agent so that the new environment strings are
  sent before the program agent exits and reloads them!

* Other minor little things.

draft is that the user will at the end of an experiment run, log into one
of his nodes and perform some analysis which is intended to be repeated at
the end of the next run, and in future instantiations of the template.

A new table called experiment_template_events holds the dynamic events for
the template. Right now I am supporting just program events, but it will be
easy to support arbitrary events later. As an absurd example:

	node6> /usr/local/bin/template_analyze ~/data_analyze arg arg ...

The user is currently responsible for making sure the output goes into a
file in the archive. I plan to make the template_analyze wrapper handle
that automatically later, but for now what you really want is to invoke a
script that encapsulates that, redirecting output to $ARCHIVE (this
variable is installed in the environment template_analyze.

The wrapper script will save the current time, and then run the program.
If the program terminates with a zero exit status, it will ssh over to ops
and invoke an xmlrpc routine to tell boss to add a program event to both
the eventlist for the current instance, and to the template_eventlist for
future instances. The time of the event is the relative start time that was
saved above (remember, each experiment run replays the event stream from
time zero).

For the future, we want to allow this to be done on ops as well, but
that will take more infrastructure, to run "program agents" on ops.

It would be nice to install the ssl xmlrpc client side on our images so
that we do not have to ssh to ops to invoke the client.

A couple of things to note:

* When requesting a graph, we have to have a checkout of the archive
  (the DB dump file) so that we can create a temporary DB with the data.
  This is done on demand, and the DB is left in place since its a
  fairly time consuming operation to do the checkout and the dbload.
  I do not delete the DBs though; we will need to age them out as needed.

* Even so, when returning to a page we end up getting the graphs
  again, and that still takes more time then I like to wait. Perhaps
  add a refresh button so that the user has to force a redraw. Might
  need to add a time/date stamp to the graph.

kinds of graphs for a template instantiation.

into per-experiment databases on ops. Additional support for reconsituting
those databases back into temporary databases on ops, for post processing.

* This revision relies on the "snort" port (/usr/ports/security/snort)
  to read the pcap files and load them into a database. The schema is
  probably not ideal, but its better then nothing. See the file
  ops:/usr/local/share/examples/snort/create_mysql for the schema.

* For simplicity, I have hooked into loghole, which already had all
  the code for downloading the trace data. I added some new methods to
  the XMLRPC server for loghole to use, to get the users DB password
  and the name of the per-experiment database. There is a new slot in
  the traces table that indicates that the trace should be snorted to
  its DB. In case you forgot, at the end of a run or when the instance
  is swapped out, loghole is run to download the trace data.

* For reconsituting, there are lots of additions to opsdb_control and
  opsdb_control.proxy to create "temporary" databases and load them
  from a dump file that is stored in the archive. I've added a button
  to the Template Record page, inappropriately called "Analyze" since
  right now all it does is reconsitute the trace data into a DB on
  ops.

  Currently, the only indication of what has been done (the name of
  the DBs created on ops) is the log email that the user gets. A
  future project is tell the user this info in the web interface.

* To turn on database capturing of trace data, do this in your NS
  file:

	set link0 ...
	$link0 trace
	$link0 trace_snaplen 128
	$link0 trace_db 1

   the increase in snaplen is optional, but a good idea if you want
   snort to undertand more then just ip headers.

* Also some changes to the parser to allow plain experiments to take
  advantage of all this stuff. To simple get yourself a per-experiment
  DB, put this in your NS file:

	tb-set-dpdb 1

  however, anytime you turn trace_db on for a link or lan, you
  automatically get a per-experiment DB.

* To capture the trace data to the DB, you can run loghole by hand:

	loghole sync -s

  the -s option turns on the "post-process" phase of loghole.

then just a dump file.

create a new template (well, really a modify) from the current
swapped in experiment. This allows you to create a template, swap in
an instance, modify the datastore in the instance (which is a copy
of the datastore in the template), and then create a new template
using the datastore and nsfile from the instance. This is a new menu
item on the showexp page for the instance.

Also in this commit are fixes and improvements to the new navagation
bar that I recently added.

* add an "active" flag to the template record, which will be used by
  the user to indicate what templates he wants listed (rather then the
  roots). Basically, the current working templates, rather then a big
  graph.

But I never actually finished that cause it sorta morphed into:

* Added a vis_graphs table to cache the last generated visualization
  rendering in the database so that we do not have to wait so long for:

* Add new buttons to showexp and template_show pages, to display in the
  same page either the settings (current view), the NS file, or the
  visualization (along with zoom in/out buttons).

And now I can go back to that "active" thing I mentioned up above ...

* Save the entire logs directory along with the results of loghole.

* A fix to make sure the database is dumped when an instance is
  terminated.

Each template has a datastore, which is really just a subdirectory that can
be populated with files, and committed to the subversion archive.  Note,
the datastore os specific to the template itself. The Template Archive link
on the Show Template page takes you to the subdirectory, which by
convention I am calling "datastore".

The directory actually lives in /proj/pid/exp/eid/TGUID-VERS ... but that
path is printed out for you on the archive page.

Anyway, put stuff in the datastore directory, and then commit the template
archive so there is a tag associated with it.

When an instance is created, a checkout of the datastore is placed in the
experiment directory (/proj/pid/eid/exp/template_datastore). The current
tag (from above) is stored with the instance so that we can later recreate
the enviroment for the instance, say for rerun.

Tarfiles and rpms in the datastore can be referenced as xxx://foo.rpm (in
your NS file).  tarfiles_setup transforms those when the instance is
swapped in, sorta like it does other URLs, only it does not actually fetch
them, just need to rewrite the paths so they reference datastore.

The program agent gets another environment variable so you can refer to the
datastore without hardwiring paths ($DATASTORE). Eventually I want to move
the checkout someplace else, but it was easy to drop it into the experiment
directory for now.

and saved in the archive at run boundries and when the instance is
terminated. No idea yet how this will be used.

Record page lets you export the contents of the archive that corresponds
to that record, along with an XML file that describes the various DB bits
for the template and instance.

This is just a first cut so that Mike can start playing around. Subject to
change, I'm sure.

The archive is dumped to /proj/$pid/exports/$guid/$vers/$exptidx, which
is basically the last commit of the instance when it was terminated.

The xml file is called export.xml and is placed in the top level directory
of the above directory. The file is created with XML::Simple, and a typical
XML file might look like:

<instance>
  <bindings>
    <name>NodeCount</name>
    <description>Number of nodes!</description>
    <value>1</value>
  </bindings>
  <bindings>
    <name>OS</name>
    <description></description>
    <value>RHL90-STD</value>
  </bindings>
  <bindings>
    <name>ScriptArgs</name>
    <description></description>
    <value>-b</value>
  </bindings>
  <eid>NewOne-V2</eid>
  <guid>10149/2</guid>
  <metadata>
    <name>M1</name>
    <guid>10162/1</guid>
    <value>Some metadata</value>
  </metadata>
  <pid>testbed</pid>
  <runs>
    <name>1</name>
    <archive_tag>T20060526-082533-172_endexp</archive_tag>
    <description></description>
    <exptidx>110</exptidx>
    <idx>1</idx>
    <runid>NewOne-V2</runid>
    <start_time>2006-05-26 08:23:02</start_time>
    <stop_time>2006-05-26 08:25:16</stop_time>
  </runs>
  <uid>stoller</uid>
</instance>

use loghole to capture the log files and store them in the experiment
archive before the commit point between runs (and at swapout).

Some other small unrelated changes as well.