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

[Dossy Shiobara]

On 2008.03.25, john gale <john at smadness.com> wrote:
> One of the advantages of using a "connect to master" setup instead of  
> a "master talks to slave" setup is that you can have an admin / client  
> scenario where the master control person tells his/her team that they  
> can connect to xx.example.com with the password "howdy" if they want  
> to lend their machine to the build system.

Another real tangible benefit is from a network configuration
standpoint.  Opening up a firewall and/or setting up port forwarding for
_one_ host (to the master) is a fixed, one-time cost.  Having to do it
for each and every slave is a O(N) cost and may not be acceptable for
some network configurations.

I do think that having a SSHBuildFactory that executes steps remotely
via SSH rather than over the normal Buildbot TCP channel could be a neat
idea--slaves either connect to the master, or the master connects out to
the slave and executes the build steps remotely ...

However, personally I much prefer the slave-connects-to-master
implementation for the reason I outlined above.

-- 
Dossy Shiobara              | dossy at panoptic.com | http://dossy.org/
Panoptic Computer Network   | http://panoptic.com/
  "He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own
    folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70)