Debug Build Farm

Access a builder in qastaging

The builders are ephemeral, meaning they fully reset after a build. Therefore, to access the builder, one should either:

  • access it during the duration of a build.

  • set the builder to manual after starting a build so that it doesn’t automatically trigger the reset when the build finishes.

Set a builder to manual

This requires permissions granted by being part of the ~admins team. To anoint yourself to be part of that team in qastaging, see Manage users and teams in development environments.

  1. Go to https://qastaging.launchpad.net/builders.

  2. Click on the builder you want to set to manual.

  3. Click the “Switch to manual-mode” button.

SSH into the builder

Once you are ready to access a builder, follow these steps:

  1. SSH into bastion ssh launchpad-bastion-ps5 and switch to the stb-vbuilder-qastaging user by running sudo -iu stg-vbuilder-qastaging.

  2. Juju ssh into the vbuilder-manage for the region your builder is, for example juju ssh vbuilder-manage-bos03/leader.

  3. Switch to the ppa user by running sudo -iu ppa.

  4. SSH into builder instance. For example, to access the bos03-amd64-004 builder, you should run ssh ubuntu@qastaging-bos03-amd64-004.vbuilder.qastaging.bos03.scalingstack.

From there, you can check the launchpad-buildd logs in /var/log/launchpad-buildd/ or run commands within the builder.

The build itself should be done within a container within the builder. If you need to look into the container, you can lxc list to list the lxc containers present in the builder, and then run lxc shell to start a shell session from within the container.