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

[knuttila @dslextreme.com]

Updates identified below.

On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 9:46 PM, knuttila @dslextreme.com <
knuttila at dslextreme.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
Up to here, it's still accurate. User error begins now ;-)


> 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)
>
>
My bad. We had a bug-let in our path. The python bits now work just fine.


> 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)
>
>

This days progress has us successfully with a create-client on the box,
with a fairly decent
test of it's functionality. (i.e. puts, gets, rms, etc)

We've moved on to do a create-node, and are in the middle of testing that.
It's on the grid as
far as the introducer is concerned.

--krk.

---
Kim Knuttila
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