Hivemind

Hivemind displays usage stats for the Berkeley EECS instructional computers. It was originally developed by Allen Guo and is now maintained by HKN's Compserv committee and hosted by the OCF.

How does it work?

Every five minutes, backend/census.py is executed. It connects to each server listed in backend/server.txt via SSH and collects information. The results from all of the servers are combined into a single JSON file (data/latest.json).

You can view the most recently generated JSON file here: https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~hkn/hivemind/data/latest.json.

Overall load formula

The "overall load" heuristic is implemented in toRating() in main.js.

Contributing

If you would like to add / remove servers from the list, please file an issue or a pull request with your requested changes.

The current list of servers is at backend/servers.txt.

Development

Want to host the website locally? Clone this repo, and start a web server in the project root directory.

The backend (i.e. the script that grabs data from the servers) is a little harder to set up:

0. Clone this repo.
1. Run make venv to create a virtualenv and install paramiko. You can also run pip install paramiko, but you'll probably want to install it locally to avoid polluting your system libraries, so a virtualenv works well for that.
2. Create an RSA key pair with no passphrase, rename the private key to hivemind_rsa and the public key to hivemind_rsa.pub and put them inside your home directory's SSH directory (~/.ssh).
3. Add the public key to your class account's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file to allow hivemind to log in to the servers automatically.
4. Change the value of LOGIN_USERNAME in census.py to your login.

You should then be able to execute census.py to grab data from each server in servers.txt. The results are printed to stdout, which run_census puts into a file for the frontend to fetch.

Credits

Hivemind was made using jQuery, Vue.js, Moment.js, Skeleton, clipboard.js, and Hint.css.

Thanks to Allen Guo, the original author, and the OCF for their generous support and hosting.

This site was developed with the support of the EECS Instructional Support Group.