[tahoe-dev] Building tahoe-lafs on 64bit Windows 7 - Part 1, The building bits.

[knuttila @dslextreme.com]

Folks,

First a short self introduction and then on the main event. My name is Kim
Knuttila and
I've been around open source work for a while now. There. That was quick.
;-)

The company I work for is interested in possibly using Tahoe as part of a
"cloudy" sort of
deployment. And while we don't expect to be limited to one target platform,
one of our early
interests is using deployed 64 bit Win7 boxen. To that end, we are trying
to build local
storage nodes on them, and running into some... hmm...  "challenges".

(no doubt some of our challenges are of our own creation -- we are not all
up to speed
on "all things tahoe" -- we're more than happy to be "educated" further ;-)

The machine is a decent dell box, with a fresh clean install of 64bit win7.
I installed
a couple of other useful things (firefox/chrome, sshd, ssh, turn off the
firewall), and
then we begin.

Instructions were followed from here:

      https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/AdvancedInstall

The first few steps went fine. (well, step 3's example code doesn't work
with the current
release -- there's an "allmydata-tahoe-1.9.2" directory in the middle --
but no biggie)

Step 4 blunts its nose into the wall. The root cause is needing a 64bit
twisted -- but the
symptom is "Unable to find vcvarsall.bat". "google is your friend" on this
sort of thing.
Some rummaging, and you find there's a couple of ways to make the message
go
away.

Current solution -- basically, go to Twisted Matrix *(*
http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/) and look for
the current win7 64bit version. I used:
"Twisted-12.3.0.win-amd64-py.2.7.msi".

Aside: it turns out that you can install the 32bit Twisted version as well,
and it will make
the message go away. Not sure if anything actually works -- we did that
last week
without final success.

But with this addition, the rest of the build step will complete with no
indication of error.
That brings us to the end of Step 4.

Step 5 won't work -- at least as far as I can see. The python file named
"tahoe" appears to
need a "c:\Python27\python.exe" in front of it. (I'm a linux guy -- on any
unix, we can use
the shell trick of marking a file executable, and giving the name of the
interpreter in the
first line. What is the equivalent trick for DOS/Win7?) In any event, if
you want to actually
run tahoe, you do something like:

c:\Python27\python.exe C:\tahoe-lafs\bin\tahoe create-client
C:\tahoelafsbase

Rather than:

C:\tahoe-lafs\bin\tahoe create-client C:\tahoelafsbase

as described.

Yes, we did some path tricks, and wrote some cheesy bat files to paper
over some of this, but it's awkward. (the silly part is I'm sure it's
do-able under win7/dos, but I've not run across the formula in casual
googling)

The last bit comes from trying to fire it up. I'm missing a bit of notes
here, but somewhere
we got a message moaning about a missing win32 api. I googled that, and
came across
a blog who was following similar footsteps for a different application.
Anyway, we installed
the pywin32 pieces from sourceforge and all that went away.

On the execution side, we're starting with getting a client up and attached
to our test
grid to see if we can pull files we've stuffed in there. The next step will
be to have the box
participate as a storage node. (the rest of the grid is centos, and there's
~18 of them)

I'm sure we'll have more questions (duh).

At this point, we're interested in hearing from folks using windows to run.
Please feel free
to critique the steps we've followed, and the general direction. We're
happy to chase/build/test
things as well. (we have a few bored-boxen that could use some work)

--krk.

---
Kim Knuttila
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