[Buildbot-devel] Has anyone looked at changing buildbot to use ssh to connect to the slaves?

[Axel Hecht]

2008/3/26, Daniel Svensson <dsvensson at gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 6:59 AM, Chad Reese <chad at kcrproducts.com> wrote:
>  >  For every slave you need to specify a name and password. It seems it
>  >  would be easy for the base shell command class to expect slave names of
>  >  the form "user at host" and either use key authentication or the supplied
>  >  slave password. ssh gives you both stdout and stderr as separate
>  >  streams. scp could easily transfer files to implement the file
>  >  upload/download steps. Pinging a slave could simply perform a "ssh
>  >  user at slave echo Alive". Environment variables can be passed with "ssh
>  >  host NAME=VALUE command ...".
>
>
> This would be an issue if the slave is not connectable, but able to
>  connect to the outside world.
>
>  I do like the idea though, it takes less time to pass around ssh keys
>  than to install buildbot+twisted, and you never need to upgrade
>  anything other than the server in your scenario (except for perhaps
>  the dev tools).
>

There's actually some rationale in the docs. Sorry, guys, daddy gotcha.

http://buildbot.net/repos/release/docs/buildbot.html#BuildSlave-Connections
mentions slaves behind NATs or firewalls.

Another feature is that you can replace one slave machine for another
without changing the master.

But, yeah, the fundamental rationale is to enable slaves that you
can't reach from the master, and that the slave doesn't need to run
any services.

Just wondering, I think I never ssh'ed into a windows box, either.

On a more featurish argument, I implement custom slave steps which are
directly python, and that report back non-string data to the master.
And I prefer that to having to write error log parsers, like you'd
have to with, say, tinderbox. Yac.

Axel