Enabling talos mozharness for FF25 development trees

Today we have enabled talos mozharness (jyeo's blog post) on all FF25 development trees on tbpl.mozilla.org.
This is a project that jyeo has completed during his internship at Mozilla's Release Engineering.

Credit to jyeo

What are the implications of this?

• It reduces chaos.
• You can run talos the same way as our infrastructure does to minimize differences
• It makes contributions easier.
• You can contribute to talos mozharness without having to install and setup Buildbot
• It removes deployments.
• We can deploy changes without having to wait on the buildbot masters to be reconfigured
• This makes specially the A-team very happy
• The A-team does not have to create talos.zip files
• The A-team does not have to wait on us to upload the talos.zip
• Developers don't need to request or create a talos.zip since we use the talos repo directly
• It makes easier developing and testing new talos changes.
• We can make configuration changes in an easier manner and it is locked to a given changest rather than affecting a whole branch
• It can ride the trains
• It only requires changes to talos.json
• This makes testing new configuration changes on try easier
• Mozharness also gives us a lot of flexibility
• Including a finer control on the usage of Python packages
• We even have mach support!
• This makes it trivial for developers to run talos in their beloved objdirs (blog post)

Cons:

• We have to take a perf hit on ts tests

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Google 2-step verification and how to set up an Android device, a desktop computer and a FirefoxOS phone

Once in a while I push myself to learn how to use security tools to prevent allowing people to steal my data. I wish security chased me and guided me to set things up without my desire to be secure, however, that is a different story.

A while ago, I added 2-step authentication with my Google account and my friend catlee showed me how I could have the Google Authenticator Android app on my phone.

NOTE: To understand 2-step verification visit this site www.google.com/2step

It took me a while to get used of keeping my phone close by to be able to authenticate. Believe it or not, I can testify that there are people out there that as soon as they get home they put their phones on a desk and walk away from it for hours.

I recently got a Keon Geeksphone running FirefoxOS and I was carrying my Android phone to be able to authenticate. After few days of asking around somebody pointed out the GAuth Authenticator WEB APP (this means that you can also run it in your browser) on Mozilla's Marketplace. At first, I was sceptic because I thought I had to give my Google credentials to a third-party company and that made me very uncomfortable. This was a misunderstanding from my part as I don't have to give my credentials at all.

NOTE: Please excuse me if there is a better workflow or I'm misunderstanding the concept.

Given this background, I will jump straight into the steps that I needed to follow to do this:

• Visit https://security.google.com/settings/security
• Click on "Edit" besides "2-step verification"

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: Set all your devices all at once with the same key. Every time you create a new key and "verify and save" it, you will be nullifying any previous keys that had been generated. All of your Google Authentication apps should be activated with the same code.

For GAuth you will need to use the key rather than the QR code

• Besides "Mobile Application" you will see "Android", "iPhone" and "Blackberry"
• Click on one of them and stick with it
• "Android" and "iPhone" will show you a QR code, however, you can use a key if you click on "Can't scan the barcode?"



GAuth on your FirefoxOS phone

• "Blackberry" will only show you a key

• Install Google Authenticator for your Android device
• Open the app and click on the settings icon at the top right
• "Set up account"
• "Scan a barcode"
• Point your camera at your desktop's browser where you have clicked on the "Android" link mentioned above
• Install GAuth Authenticator on your FirefoxOS phone or on your desktop through Firefox (Chrome or IE won't work)
• Open the app
• Click on the "+" sign
• Give the account a name
• Enter the key that Google gives you

NOTE: On your desktop machine, Firefox will install the Web app as a regular application (e.g. /Applications for Mac)

NOTE2: If I install the app through Firefox Beta instead of Nightly, Mac will prevent the app from running the web app due to security concerns. I believe all you have to do is go to the Applications folder and do a right click and click "Open". This should add an exception according to this article.

• You can also run it as a website on any browser by visiting http://gauth.apps.gbraad.nl

Happy 2-step authentication!

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Kiss the old testing infra (Revision 3 Mac minis) goodbye

It is with great joy that today we are turning the page on our old Release Engineering infrastructure. Since Q1 2010, we have run unit tests and talos jobs on rev3 Mac minis which have seen seven different end-user operating systems: xp, win7-32/64-bit,10.5, 10.6, Fed12 32/64-bit. We stopped support for OS X 10.5 and moved our 10.6 tests to rev4 Mac minis over the past two years, and back in April we moved most of our Fedora32/64-bit test/talos jobs to Ubuntu32/64 VMs in AWS and on iX hardware.

I'm so high! Have you seen this infra? It's magical! Rainbows for you and me.

Several weeks ago, we had another major milestone in the transition of the XP and w7 architectures when new iX machines (the same type of hardware we used for Ubuntu and Windows 8) started arriving at our Vantage data center in Santa Clara.  Thanks to DCOps and RelOps, we got them up and running this May, and we enabled identical test jobs on them.  Today, we are disabling unit tests and talos jobs on our old Rev3 Mac mini machines for Firefox 23 and Firefox 24 development trees for Windows XP and Windows 7.  This change moves the last two platforms off the rev3 minis and allows them to be retired once they finish riding the trains for ESR17 in December.

What is shiny about this infrastructure? 

Q Fortier and Mark Cornmesser (from RelOps) wrote steps for the initial installation using Microsoft's WDS/MDT framework, which allows for modular, shared task sequences between systems. Changes to the machines can be made after the fact using Microsoft's GPO (Group Policy Object), and, in the future, support will also be added for puppet.  This is the same setup as with our new Windows 8 infrastructure. This helps us deprecate our lovely (...not) OPSI system and it takes away the pain of deploying things manually through VNC or SSH (I know, I know :S ) on our Win7 machines.

Another neat thing is that we will be able to remotely power cycle these machines like the rest of our infrastructure since they have out-of-band management support via IPMI. We can also increase capacity of this infrastructure more easily than the Mac minis since the iX hardware has a longer and more predictable purchasing lifecycle than Apple machines.

We now have 130 nodes for each Windows flavor (Win8, Win7 and WinXP) taking care of all of the jobs on mozilla-central based trees plus mozilla-aurora.  For now, the rev3 machines will ride the trains until ESR17 is killed in December. We could try to fast track this process by uplifting some patches but we don't see a pressing reason to add more human hours into it.

It's been a pleasure to be part of this large testing infrastructure refresh and working together with arr, coop, dmoore, dustin, edmorley, Fredo, hwine, Hubear, markco, melissa, philor, Q, rail, RyanVM, tfranco, van, vinh, sal and devs. My apologies if I missed anyone.

If you're curious, all 5 different operating systems were set up under this huge tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=820243

iX systems:

http://www.ixsystems.com

EDIT: 30-May: I added few more people to the thank you list.

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.