[Spread-users] Trying to use spread on 6 machines in a lab.

[Jonathan Stanton]

I would suggest a few things. 

First, I would remove the localhost segment from the spread.conf. I'm not
sure it is a problem, but it isn't needed.

Second, in order to test whether the basic spread configuration is
working, I would suggest using the spuser and spflooder programs included
with the spread distribution. The spuser in particular should be easy to
use to check basic functionality. Below is a sample 'successful' session
using spuser:

with a daemon running on port 8701:

[jonathan at ice5 linux]$ ./spuser -s 8701
Spread library version is 4.0.0
User: connected to 8701 with private group #user#ice5

==========
User Menu:
----------

        j <group> -- join a group
        l <group> -- leave a group

        s <group> -- send a message
        b <group> -- send a burst of messages

        r -- receive a message (stuck) 
        p -- poll for a message 
        e -- enable asynchonous read (default)
        d -- disable asynchronous read 

        q -- quit

User> j test

User> 
============================
Received REGULAR membership for group test with 1 members, where I am
member 0:
        #user#ice5
grp id is -2133009127 1024691918 1
Due to the JOIN of #user#ice5

User> s test
enter message: hi there

User> 
============================
received SAFE message from #user#ice5, of type 1, (endian 0) to 1 groups 
(9 bytes): hi there

User> l test

User> 
============================
received membership message that left group test

--------------------------

If this works, then the basic configuration is working. A slightly better
test is to join the same group using spuser running on two different
machines and see that they receive each others messages when you do the "s
test" command.

If both of these work, then we have isolated the problem to either a
python issue, or the test programs you wrote. 

> Finally the first time I configured the /etc/spread.conf.  I used fully 
> specified hosts names in it.  This caused the spread daemon to display
> some wierd characters and seemed to cause it to be unstable.

There is a fairly short limit on the number of characters that a hostname
can be. The printing of long names causes some minor cosmetic problem but
it shouldn't cause any actual instability. Can you be more specific about
how it was unstable?

Thanks,

Jonathan

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------
Jonathan R. Stanton         jonathan at cs.jhu.edu
Dept. of Computer Science   
Johns Hopkins University    
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