In spirit of last night’s COSI meeting, I figured I should get ahead of the game and post a little bit about what I’ve been up to with OSP. There were a number of shortcomings with the 0.2 release in terms of permanent storage and replication. Since r65 (version 0.2) there have been a number of changes, mostly some old ones centered on ERLFS and the most recent ones, which tweak the mnesia settings. Below are some important revisions and their impact:

• r88 – Now will autosense is a node has a disk, and will determine whether or not to keep a copy of the applications table on the disk or just in RAM
• r89 – Made gen-join.pl which asks the user a bunch of questions to make a join script for easier setup
• r93 – When you first install OSP, you should run ./setup-osp.sh to initialize the database on the first/master node
• r96 – Added the add-backup-server, which will make a disk copy of all the tables to that backup server incase of node failure, there’s a backup copy

While thse changes are small, they are still very needed in creating an actual application. Currently, OSP is at r97, only 3 away from the big 100. I thought that we should have a mini OSP party when we reach r100, but since OSP is distributed, so should the party. So when you get word of the 100th commit, please raise a glass or eat a slice of cake.

As the semester is coming to a close, I thought I’d list some of the things I was able to get done this semester and what I’d like to progress on in the future.

Accomplishments:

1. Released the Open Server Platform version 0.2
2. Managed COSI‘s Zimbra server
3. Took the following classes: Compilers, Operating Systems, Network Security, Intro. to Psych, E. Linear Algebra.

Goals:

1. Polish off Wiki Wide Web
2. Work on OSP
3. Have a relaxing, fun summer
4. Work on MOSS

That’s all that comes to mind at the moment, I’m sure I’ll think of more as time goes by.

Peace and chow,

Ranok

After less than a week OSP has reached another milestone in it’s development! Version 0.2 was just released with a few big fixes, performance improvments and added functionality. Also the documentation has been improved and made consistant with the code.

The most important bug fix was a performance issue that caused a slowdown over time, this has been fixed and along with it, the performance and scalability has increased! The biggest feature added was support for UDP (and soon SCTP, and SSL) which can be set without changing the code! Imagine writing a server and deploying it using TCP, UDP, SSL and SCTP, just by changing one line in the XML servlet.

Setup should be simple too, just download from Google Code, extract, make and then compile your servlet. Now on the first node, run ./start-osp.sh and then you can telnet to port 9876 and administer your cluster.

Links:

• Open Server Platform home
• OSP Group
• OSP Code

Enjoy,

Ranok

I’m happy to announce that my OSP version has gotten stable enough to release version 0.1! While still a very temperamental system, it is showing true promise. It’s gotten to the point where on the first node, you edit a configuration file and run start-osp.sh and on each of the other nodes, just copy join.sh and edit it on each machine. After it’s run on each, you can telnet into the first machine and start applications which all have shared state across the cluster.

For more information, check out the home page, the Google Code page and the Google Group.

Just writing a little status update for my Open Server Platform (OSP) project that I’ve been working on:

Progress:

• Rewrote much of OSP to take in a XML servlet (meta-data and code) and act as a socket broker for that servlet.
• Wrote a  number of  servlet libraries to make programming easier and safer.
• Added a global shared state that can be spread redundantly across multiple nodes (using Mnesia)
• Added the ability for applications to be atomic, either they complete and update the shared state, or they crash and don’t influence the shared state at all.

Todo:

• Move the OSP broker under an OTP supervisor for auto-restart.
• Make OSP more configurable and automatic
• Make a nice administration and status system
• Devise and implement a load balancing and fail-over system
• Test and tweak as needed
• Write more servlet libraries

Also, I have been approached by a CS senior from the west coast who has offered to help work on ERLFS! I’d love more help if you know/want to learn Erlang, and help develop a very powerful and useful product.