Experience with a recent OpenBACH installation

[martin-ottens]

Since OpenBACH has been shortlisted for a current project, I wanted to evaluate OpenBACH more closely in a test installation. Not everything went smoothly during my tests and I invested some singificant amount time playing around, so I wanted to document my experiences in this issue.

Ubuntu 20.04

First I followed the installation instructions on the OpenBACH website and tried an installation on Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS systems (1 VM for controller/collector/Auditorium, 2 VMs as agents). I also used an Ubuntu 20.04 system for running Ansible.

The required Ansible version mentioned in the installtion instruction on the website differs from the version mentioned in the installation manual here in the repo. Using the older version resulted in various Ansible errors (e.g. syntax errors with --filter-Argument for rsync, missing arguments for InfluxDB modification). Since some problems were addressed in the projects dev branch, I did further tests with this branch (and not with the master branch as recommended).

The manual suggests to install Ansible using system-wide pip, this is no longer possible/recommended in current distros, see the Ansible pipx installation manual to manually install a specific version of Ansible.

During the installation I still encountered some problems (using Ansible 4.5.0 (from pip, core 2.11.12, python 3.8.10) on Ubuntu 20.04):

• install_controller : Install apt dependencies: postgresql-server-dev-14 is not available on current Ubuntu 20.04 installations, replacing it with postgressql-server-dev-all works
• With a default ssh server on Ubuntu 20.04, the installation machine was at some random points unable to connect the targets (UNREACHABLE), in this case a restart of the installation playbook helped
• configure_ssh_keys : Trust the SSH key of the Controllers by the Agents always fails on first attempt
• A reboot of the collector/controller/auditorium machine was required after installation, so that data was shown in the chronograf interface (maybe due to restarts of the installation playbook?)

Ubuntu 22.04

After taking a look at the repo, I realized that Ubuntu 22.04 is also supported. In this case I used Ansible 2.14.3 (Debian 12 default) from a Debian host on three Ubuntu 22.04 targets with the OpenBACH dev branch. I have not encountered any problems during the installtion. Unfortuatly I encountered some issues while using OpenBACH:

• Suggestion: Mention the default user for the auditorium in the installation manual :)
• While creating a scenario, you can select that a function is started n seconds after a certain condition is fullfilled (e.g. a previous function is running). Selecting another function there is possible, but all fields are reset after you save the scenario. In some short tests it seems like these dependencies between functions are not working at all - I worked around this issue by using an absolute time in my scenario functions.
• Some default jobs (e.g. iperf3) should be installed automatically on the agents during initial installtion. The controller was aware of this (auditorium:admin /jobs and the agent overview in the project showed, that the jobs where installed) but the execution on the agents failed because the job was not found. After removing and reinstalling the jobs using auditorium:admin /jobs it worked without problems.

Conclusion

Even if OpenBACH wasn't the right choice for my project in the end, I see a lot of potential. For a quick trial, as in my case, it would be ideal if the instructions provided could be updated.