Instructions use bad port range

[Peter Dolkens]

The OpenStack Manual here: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/development_saio.html

Suggests a bunch of ports starting around 6000 and going up to 6043 or so.

This is a bad range, especially for linux beginners (like myself) who then have to figure out what the hell is stealing their ports, because they're puttied into an SSH terminal, and xwin is running on one of the ports (6011 and 6012 in my case).

The common xwin port range is 6000-6063, and the instructions should be updated to pick ports outside of this range, as xwin is something extremely common I would imagine.

[Tom Fifield (fifieldt)]

Hi,

I agree that port overloading is bad, especially on the xwin port.

However, my thoughts are we should consult with the swift developers to see if they are OK with changing the default port, rather than doing the docs "quick fix". This way the change would be permanent and the entire community is likely to become consistent..

How does that sound Peter ?

One could also argue that this is a specific problem with the SAIO, where people are more likely to be using an existing machine with other software installed. Compared with a full-blown installation where it's unlikely swift storage nodes have x servers installed.

Thoughts?

Regards,

Tom

[Peter Dolkens (peter.dolkens)]

To be honest, I started looking at OpenStack a week ago, so I'm happy to defer any judgement to others in the community.

But as a beginner to Linux, and OpenStack, following the Swift SAIO dev documentation, I would expect the instructions to pick a port that is less likely to be used.

This is especially true given that these are dev instructions, so most likely would be running on a dev box, which I believe would have X-Servers installed quite often.

As for Swift itself, I'm have 0 experience with configuring swift beyond my first adventure last week, and was unaware that there were "default ports", just the ports in the documentation.

[Tom Fifield (fifieldt)]

Peter,

Thanks very much for your feedback! We really value observations from people just starting out - as you don't share our bad assumptions :) Please do keep up the awesome bug reports.

I'll now manipulate the bug so that it heads over to swift developer land as well and maybe followup with a mailing list post to kick off the discussion. Things might not happen too quickly, as one really important feature of swift is the ability to do in-place upgrades where a port change could be potentially 'interesting'. We'll see how it goes ...

[gauvrit (xavier-gauvrit)]

Hello Tom
I'm an OpenStack beginner and i want to help fixing this issue.
Have you got any feedback from swift developper land ?
Just let me know if you need me to test some specific configuration.
Regards,
Xavier

[gauvrit (xavier-gauvrit)]

Hello Tom, Peter
It seems that this range is bringing some trouble
 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=947860
I'm gonna try to set an other range starting at 4200 and see if it works better
Does any of you aware of a pb using this range ?
Xavier

[Matt Fischer (mfisch)]

The docs no longer reference any of the bad ports, so I'm marking this incomplete.

[John Dickinson (notmyname)]

seems this was a docs bug and has been resolved.

In swift, we require the port to be explicitly set now, and I'd love to see the recommended value to be changed. Simple to change, but it just hasn't been done yet.