On 09/30/2011 10:33 AM, Russell Bryant wrote:
Greetings,
I spent time this week working with Matahari on Windows. I wanted to
write down some notes on the experience and my thoughts on some things
we need to do to improve Matahari on Windows while it's fresh on my mind.
In case you haven't worked with Matahari on Windows before, here is an
overview of my test environment.
My environment was Windows Server 2008 R2 in a VM. The development/test
cycle involved building and installing the mingw32-matahari package,
which results in an ISO being available here:
/usr/i686-pc-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/share/matahari/matahari-0.4.7-win32.iso
I connected the ISO to the VM so it showed up as its CD drive. The ISO
contains an installer which runs like a typical Windows installer.
Here are some things that I came across that I think we should fix or
improve:
1) Fix stopping services
When you stop a service, the underlying agent process doesn't actually
get stopped.
2) Logging
Logging isn't supported. We should implement support for logging things
to the Windows event log.
Matahari is installed as a set of Windows services (one service per
agent). However, it is incredibly difficult to do any troubleshooting
on agents while they are running as a service since there is no log. In
my testing, I stopped the services and ran the agents manually in a
shell so that I could see the output.
Even when the agent was run in a shell, the only output you could get
was whatever the default logger verbosity setting was. I implemented
the "verbose" option for the registry so that you could get the more
verbose debug output.
3) Fixes for uninstall
When you uninstall Matahari, it still leaves the services installed
(which at that point are broken). I think it also leaves some entries
in the start menu.
4) Windows installer availability
I'm not sure when this will become a real issue, but at some point I
think we will need to start delivering a Windows installer along side
tarball releases. Even if a Windows VM on a Linux host is the primary
production use case, I think a standalone installer that can be
downloaded would be good to make it easier to try out Matahari on Windows.
ack on all of these. I think putting up a separate NSIS installer
executable separate from the rpm/iso packaging would be a good thing to
do, also pretty trivial since we already create the installer we just
only deliver it wrapped in the iso/rpm combo.
Perry