blog.oddbit.com

I wanted to learn about writing custom Puppet types and providers.

I was the presenter for this morning’s RDO hangout, where I ran through a simple demonstration of setting up a multinode OpenStack deployment using packstack.

This is just here as a reminder for me: An OVS interface has a variety of attributes associated with it, including an external-id field that can be used to associate resources outside of OpenVSwitch with the interface.

I work with several different OpenStack installations.

When you boot a virtual instance under OpenStack, your instance has access to certain instance metadata via the Nova metadata service, which is canonically available at http://169.254.169.254/.

This Wednesday, January 15, at 14:00 UTC (that’s 9AM US/Eastern, or date -d "14:00 UTC" in your local timezone) I will be helping out with the RDO bug triage day.

I’ve put together a few tools to help gather information about your Neutron and network configuration and visualize it in different ways.

Heat is a template-based orchestration mechanism for use with OpenStack.

I just recently learned about the signalfd(2) system call, which was introduced to the Linux kernel back in 2007: signalfd() creates a file descriptor that can be used to accept signals targeted at the caller.

In this article, a followup to my previous post regarding long-poll servers and Python, we investigate the code changes that were necessary to make the code work when deployed on OpenShift.

In this post I’m going to step through an example web chat system implemented in Python (with Bottle and gevent) that uses long polling to implement a simple publish/subscribe mechanism for efficiently updating connected clients.

I recently added some scripts to automatically generate tag feeds for my blog when pushing new content.

The python-openstackclient project, by Dean Troyer and others, is a new command line tool to replace the existing command line clients (including commands such as nova, keystone, cinder, etc).

I’ve enabled blog comments using Disqus.

Interacting with JSON-based APIs from the command line can be difficult, and OpenStack is filled with REST APIs that consume or produce JSON.

I originally posted this article on the RDO website.

This blog has been hosted on scriptogram for the past year or so.

I’ve been working with OpenStack a lot recently, and I’ve ended up with a small collection of utilities that make my life easier.

The documentation for configuring Neutron recommends that a network controller has three physical interfaces: Before you start, set up a machine to be a dedicated network node.

Have you ever wished that you could use libvirt domain names as hostnames?

I recently acquired both a Raspberry Pi and a PiFace IO board.

This showed up on #openstack earlier today: 2013-07-22T13:56:10 <m0zes> hello, all.

This is a short script that takes a list of concatenated certificates as input (such as a collection of CA certificates) and produces a collection of numbered files, each containing a single certificate. #!

A recent update to Arch Linux replaced the qemu-kvm package with an updated version of qemu.

I’ve set up my Raspberry Pi to communicate with my Arduino via I2C.

There are several Python libraries out there for interacting with the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi: RPi.GPIO The WiringPi bindings for Python, and The Quick2Wire Python API (which depends on Python 3) All of them are reasonably easy to use, but the Quick2W…

I’ve recently started playing with an Arduino kit I purchased a year ago (and only just now got around to unboxing).

I’ve been reading up on Puppet 3 lately, and came across the following: XMLRPC was the new hotness when development on Puppet started.

In Fedora 17 there are still a number of services that either have not been ported over to systemd or that do not take full advantage of systemd.

I’ve been working with Arch Linux recently, which uses dhcpcd as its default DHCP agent.

I was intrigued by this post on socket activated containers with systemd.

It took me an unreasonably long time to boot an LXC container with working console access.

I spent some time today looking at systemd (44) under Fedora (17).

This is a followup to an earlier post about Arch Linux.

I’ve been playing around with the LXC support in libvirt recently, and I’m trying to use a model where each LXC instance is backed by a dedicated LVM volume.

If you are starting virtual machines via libvirt, and you have attached them to the default network, there is a very simple method you can use to determine the address assigned to your running instance: Libvirt runs dnsmasq for the default network, and sa…

I decided to take a look at Arch Linux this evening.

I’m been writing a provisioning tool for OpenStack recently, and I’ve put together a demo configuration that installs a simple cluster consisting of three backend nodes and a front-end http proxy.

I needed to replace the native OpenJDK based Java VM with the Oracle Java distribution on one of our CentOS servers.

I recently embarked upon a quest to categorize a year’s worth of trouble tickets (around 15000 documents total).

I’m in the process of porting over content from Blogger.

In order to import posts from Blogger into Scriptogr.am I needed to convert all the HTML formatting into Markdown.

I ran into an odd problem the other day: I was testing out some configuration changes for a web application by dropping files into /tmp and pointing the application configuration at the appropriate directory.

Scriptogr.am has a very simple api that allows one to POST and DELETE articles.

I’ve recently been exploring the world of Windows scripting, and I ran into a small problem: I was running a script at system startup, and the script was running before the network interface (which was using DHCP) was configured.

I was looking for PowerShell solutions for generating a random password (in order to set the Administrator password on a Windows instance provisioned in OpenStack), and found several solutions using the GeneratePassword method of System.Web.Security.Membe…

This is the first of two articles in which I discuss my work in getting some Windows instances up and running in our OpenStack environment.

Occasionally we will deploy a virtual instance into our KVM infrastructure and realize after the fact that we need more local disk space available.

Recently, changes from the xmlgawk project have been integrated into GNU awk, and xmlgawk has been renamed to gawkextlib.

I really like Markdown, a minimal markup language designed to be readable as plain text that can be rendered into structurally valid HTML.