If you are a project admin in TeamForge Lab Management with profiles assigned to your project, or if you are a TeamForge Lab Management domain admin, it is important that you have an understanding of how to administer profiles.
Important: It is essential that you first have a solid understanding of how to retrieve and interpret profile details. Making changes to profiles without understanding the effects of what you are doing can cause disruption to your own project, and if the profile you are administering is a public profile, possibly many other projects that use this profile as well.
Profile definitions are versioned, which means the history of changes to profiles is preserved. This allows users to build with various versions of a profile, go back to earlier ones if a new one doesn't work for them, and upgrade to a newer version when available. As an administrator, you have the power to set descriptions on profiles and individual versions, block the use of certain versions, and so on.
Within the Profile Library, you can reach the Profile Admin page by selecting a profile in the Profile Library, and clicking on the Admin tab.
Properties can be version-independent or version-dependent.
- Version-independent properties are common across all profile versions -- they do not vary, regardless of the profile's version. These are basically the settings that are configured when the profile is first being added to Lab Management with profiles assigned to your project, or if you are a TeamForge Lab Management. They are displayed at the top of the Profile Admin screen.
- Version-dependent properties are associated with a particular version of a profile.
Note: These properties, when set, will apply to the version in question, as well as to any subsequent version.
Setting the property on a later version will overwrite the property on earlier versions.
These properties are displayed below the version-independent properties on the Profile Admin screen. Most of the properties that you can edit are version-dependent properties.
Only one version's properties are displayed at any given time for editing. To view multiple versions at the same time, use the Profile Details page.
Version-independent properties
Note: Some version-independent properties, set at profile creation time, cannot be changed.
There are three version-independent properties that you can change:
- Summary
- This is a brief summary of the profile. You can enter a more detailed description for each version in the properties section.
- Project
- The project that the profile belongs to. If you select "no project" using the "-" option, the profile will belong to the domain. The Project selection box is only available to domain admins.
- Is Public?
- This setting governs whether the profile is usable by all profiles, or just to members of this project.
Version-dependent properties
There are many version-dependent properties that you can change for each profile.
Some of these properties include:
- Those that specify hardware requirements needed to build this profile. This will make sure a profile is assigned to a host that can actually successfully be rebuilt with the profile.
- An option to specify whether the profile version can be used or not. Useful for marking a profile version "bad" so it cannot be inadvertently selected by users.
- The logo to associate with the profile version. This logo will be displayed in many locations throughout the system to easily identify profiles. Use the link to the Profile Logo Gallery to add and maintain logos.
Note: When working with these properties, be sure you are operating on the correct version!
- Description
- A description for this version of the profile. Try to put some informative text here, so potential users of this profile will have some guidance as to what this version contains, or how it is different from other versions.
- Tag
- A symbolic name for a profile version. Tags can be used to make versions easier to remember, and can be moved around between profile versions, similar to a "tag" in Subversion or CVS. Valid characters for Tags are: letters A-Z, numbers 0-9, and underscores ; although a profile cannot be all numeric, and must contain at least one non-numeric character. The Tag HEAD is reserved, and always refers to the latest version -- buildable or not -- of the profile.
Tags are commonly used by project admins and other project leaders to instruct their users about the proper versions of profiles to use.
- Can new systems be built with this version of the profile? (also known as "Buildable").
- For any number of reasons, you may wish to restrict profiles so that one or more versions of that profile are not buildable. For example, you may wish to force your users to always use the latest version of your profile: this would be easily accomplished by making all the profile versions not buildable except the most recent. You can change the buildability of a version at any time.
- Icon
- You can choose from any of the available icons for your profile, although a profile icon is strictly optional. Icons are not private to your project, and are shared among the whole domain, so do not upload anything too secret (or naughty!).
- Buildable CPU Types
- The types of CPU that can be used to build the profile, for example, "Xeon" or "UltraSparc IV". Setting this property is strictly optional, even if the profile has CPU type restrictions.
- Buildable CPU Archs
- The CPU architectures that can be used to build the profile, for example, "x86_64" or "sun4v". Setting this property is strictly optional, even if the profile has CPU architecture restrictions.
- Buildable Number of CPUs
- The number of CPU's required to run the profile. Setting this property is strictly optional, even if the profile has restrictions around the number of CPU's it can use.
- Buildable Hardware Models
- Specific hardware models which are required to run the profile, for example, "PDP-11". Setting this property is strictly optional, even if the profile has hardware model restrictions.
- Size (in GB)
- The minimum hard disk size, in gigabytes (GB), required to install and run the profile.