[ooni-dev] mlab-ns integration testing and easy-disable-feature.

[Arturo Filastò]

On 7/24/14, 9:16 PM, Nathan Wilcox wrote:
> Dear Oonitarians,
> 
> We're about to start testing some mlab-ns integration features on the
> M-Lab test slice.  This will be potentially disruptive because we'll
> be reinitializing the slice, installing new bits and bobs, and we'll
> be using our own fork of ooni-support [1] rather than upstream
> ooni-support [2].
> 
> Please let us know if we should *not* do this soon.  Today I planned
> to only poke mlab1.nuq0t.measurement-lab.org [3], but eventually we
> want to test at least two test slivvers.
> 

I guess it is a little bit late to reply to this, though it should not
be a big issue since we have another collector running that is not
hosted on mlab.

> Meanwhile, what happens if we deploy some integration glue and it
> doesn't work, or has unanticipated problems in the future, or M-Lab
> policies change, etc?
> 

I guess the ideal solution would be to have good integration testing so
that the risk of this is minimized. From the looks of it you have
already done a good job at writing code for this.

Regarding M-Lab policy changes I think this is something that will
require human intervention and is not easy to automate.

> To anticipate those kinds of issues, we want to make sure that it's
> easy to toggle off the integration stuff.  One of our key design goals
> has been to avoid modifying upstream ooni.  We've just realized a new
> and related design goal: make sure it's easy to turn off the
> integration glue without requiring slice re-initialization, packages
> changes, repository changes, etc...  So we just added a ticket for
> that [4].
> 

It looks like that inside of
bouncer-plumbing/mlab-to-bouncer/update-bouncer.sh you have implemented
a flag for doing this so this should be sorted out.

> Note that *while* we are doing this interactive testing, the two
> slivvers we're using will be pretty unstable, but *after* we reach a
> stable level of development, we should be able to flip the integration
> switch to off and the M-Lab test slice should operate as before
> (except with some extra stuff installed).
> 

What is the current state of the slivvers? Is the integration logic
switched off now? Are you done with interactive testing?

~ Art.