Bearbin's Automated Builds

[bearbin]

xoft: I think the main issue with the buildserver is in fact an issue with GitHub, and It's been happening with Travis builds a bit recently too.

I would be open to upgrading the server to a new one, the current one is underpowered and overall not a great fit. I'm not entirely sure of the benefits of crowdsourcing the servers - for some builds there's a lot of manual setup like the Rasbperry Pi ones, and I doubt many people would be willing to spin up a debian stable box specially, if they don't use it already, and that's necessary because there are very large benefits to standardising the build environment.

The ideal solution would be to get a KS-1 or a KS-3 dedicated server, which have reasonably fast processors, good bandwidth and enough RAM. They come from OVH, a good hosting provider: http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/

The KS-1 is affordable for me but it's always out of stock so I haven't been able to rent one. For the KS-3 I can't really justify spending £13 a month on a server when I have basically no income of my own.

[bearbin]

A KS-3 just became available. I have registered it for one month, and I can renew it if I need the server for more time.

If somebody would be willing to support the server through some sort of donation I will start moving the buildserver over.

[xoft]

Actually when there's a build running on the server, it's almost impossible to connect to the web interface, let alone download something. We really need the master to not run any builds.

I can help with some of the costs, I could spend some 5 GBP per month. Now that gratipay is basically down, I guess I'll send the money directly via paypal to you.

[bearbin]

That would be good. My paypal address is alexanderharkness@hotmail.co.uk

What I'll do is because the new machine is 4 core and not 2 like the old one, I'll set builds to only take 3 cores and the remaining one can be for the web interface.

[bearbin]

The new buildserver setup is coming along well.

There will be a few changes once we change over to the new one:

• I've changed to sha1 for file checksums, as there's no advantage to using md5, and it's a stronger algorithm.
  
• The builds of the master branch now have Master appended to the end, to fit in with the Testing branch and the future stable branch.
  

@xoft: I'd like to enlist your help with setting up Windows builds on the new machine. If you could create a new account on the new buildserver URL http://bernard.bearbin.net I can set up the permissions so you can manage the Windows slaves.

The new server is much more performant, as with 4 cores we can have 3 simultaneous builds and 1 core left for rendering the UI. It all works very fast.

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The new buildserver will also be using clang for builds where possible, as debian stable now has an up-to-date version.

[xoft]

Can't we keep the current server as the master, and the new server as a build-only slave? Or are you planning to retire the current server?

[bearbin]

I'm planning to retire the current server, or perhaps add it as a build-only slave to the new server.

The new server has more bandwidth and disk space, and the old one was running into disk space issues.

[worktycho]

How old do you keep the builds?

[bearbin]

On the old one I kept the last 20 binaries and last 50 build records. I'm planning to keep everything on the new server, until I get to 50% disk usage and then reconsider (there's a 2TB disk so it will probably take a while).

[bearbin]

The only missing builds now are the RasPi builds, so @xoft when you can can you change the dns on builds.cuberite.org from bronze.bearbin.net. to bernard.bearbin.net.?