Make Commanders run any executable?

[willcl-ark]

I think we should run a second process on the bitcoin nodes, which will simply watch a directory for executables, and run them when new ones are detected.

This watches /tmp/watchdog and runs whatever it finds there (#dangerzone).

This is of course fun, but also we can use it to generate random network activity without requiring the RPC server to co-ordinate everything using synchronous JSONRPC calls over http (zzzzzz)...

Someone already made a nice python lib to do this, so the code ends up pretty simple.

I know it sounds like a terrible idea, but I think it might actually be quite useful! The only issue is that we may want to add a gpg sig file or something if we had this during an attack day, as we wouldn't last long with folks dropping in auto-executed files...

Thoughts?

[josibake]

So the idea here is you could scp' a script to one or more tanks and they would automatically start doing whatever the script tells the container to do until the file is later removed?

Seems like it could be useful, but somewhat goes against the idea of reproducibility and doesn't seem to fit with using the python test framework for driving network wide scenarios. Perhaps we table it for now, unless you have a compelling usecase?

[willcl-ark]

ping @m3dwards @josibake @mplsgrant @pinheadmz

Found it

[willcl-ark]

Going to close this for now, as with the Commander layout I no longer feel the RPC server is a bottleneck (though I still do like this concept of running "anything", and this it's perhaps how a Commander should operate)

[josibake]

I think in general we will move the commander to be able to dockerize any script the user wants. If we also want a script or process running in the same pod as a bitcoind node, I feel pretty strongly it should be injected via the helm chart. we talked about this notion of "profiles" before and that feels like the better place to start deciding what a bitcoind node looks like, including what little scripts we want running in the same container.

[willcl-ark]

I'll leave this open and rename the issue then