Docker Toolbox okay?

[cmharlow]

Thanks for the info! I have a quick question for you: I'll be using an old work laptop that is running Windows 7. I notice that Docker has a "Toolbox" version that will run on old machines like this one. Do you know if using Docker Toolbox will present any problems when following along during the workshop? Thanks, -Jared

(asked by jared cowing, Jared dot Cowing at WOODBURY dot EDU, not on github afaict but will point him here for the answer)

[markbreedlove]

I would come in prepared for it not to work, but maybe try it out and see what happens. We can only verify that it works on the recent version of Docker Community Edition.

[jcoyne]

When I've done participant workshops like this, I expect there will be 15% of the participants who are unable to get the software working. Someone (me) can spend 5 minutes helping them individually, but there may be nothing to do for it. The best strategy I've come up with is to ask everyone to partner up and hope that everyone ends up with a partner who has a working machine.

[mdellabitta]

This is something they could download and test right now, isn't it?

[chrpr]

I've been testing this out, since I happen to have a windows 7 machine. A few things I've noticed:

• We should list disk space requirements somewhere. I only had a couple gig free, and Docker gave me no information about why it failed, the download and extract steps just hung indefinitely.
• Docker toolbox has some issues shutting down VMs. docker-machine stop hung forever. But if you just exit from the command line, it leaves it running. I had to go into Task Manager and kill VBoxHeadless.exe to get back to the point where I could exit cleanly and restart. I recommend folks open Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager and stop and start their VM that way.
• localhost:8080 isn't going to work for these folks without some crazy passthrough stuff. This may be true of Windows users in general? docker-machine ip default will give you your IP. Mine was 192.168.99.100. Hit that on :8080 to get to Zeppelin.

Otherwise, everything seems to work.

[chrpr]

Hmmm. Actually, can't easily just restart the thing when running through the VirtualBox Manager either. I ended up having to delete the default machine and re-pull the image. Will try to find a cleaner way to deal with this...

Okay, docker-machine stop is no longer hanging. If you get a clean exit from the Docker Quickstart Terminal, the next time you run it, it connects to the existing default with Zeppelin intact. Phew. 😅

[markbreedlove]

Thanks for checking this out!

[markbreedlove]

Looks like people need 6G disk free plus whatever it takes to install Docker. Maybe we should say 10 to be safe. I don't know what volume of data the spark processing is going to generate.

[cmharlow]

I'll ping the participant via email again just in case he didn't follow up by looking here. Thanks all. To be clear: it can work with that Docker Toolbox version on Windows 7, it just needs memory.

And yes, @jcoyne - we had already decided to set up pairing if people didn't bring right equip.

[cmharlow]

Also, we did have disk space requirements listed in the email + env setup instructions, @chrpr . Good to verify the need.