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Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: ironic

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 15, 2014
Post category:OpenStack

Welcome to the third in my set of posts covering discussion topics at the nova juno mid-cycle meetup. The series might never end to be honest. This post will cover the progress of the ironic nova driver. This driver is interesting as an example of a large contribution to the nova code base for a couple of reasons -- its an official OpenStack project instead of a vendor driver, which means we should already have well aligned goals. The driver has been written entirely using our development process, so its already been reviewed to OpenStack standards, instead of being a large code dump from a separate development process. Finally, its forced us to think through what merging a non-trivial code contribution should look like, and I think that formula will be useful for later similar efforts, the Docker driver for example. One of the sticking points with getting the ironic driver landed is exactly how upgrade for baremetal driver users will work. The nova team has been unwilling to just remove the baremetal driver, as we know that it has been deployed by at least a few OpenStack users -- the largest deployment I am aware of is over 1,000…

Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: containers

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 15, 2014
Post category:OpenStack

This is the second in my set of posts discussing the outcomes from the OpenStack nova juno mid-cycle meetup. I want to focus in this post on things related to container technologies. Nova has had container support for a while in the form of libvirt LXC. While it can be argued that this support isn't feature complete and needs more testing, its certainly been around for a while. There is renewed interest in testing libvirt LXC in the gate, and a team at Rackspace appears to be working on this as I write this. We have already seen patches from this team as they fix issues they find on the way. There are no plans to remove libvirt LXC from nova at this time. The plan going forward for LXC tempest testing is to add it as an experimental job, so that people reviewing libvirt changes can request the CI system to test LXC by using "check experimental". This hasn't been implemented yet, but will be advertised when it is ready. Once we've seen good stable results from this experimental check we will talk about promoting it to be a full blown check job in our CI system. We have…

Juno nova mid-cycle meetup summary: social issues

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 15, 2014
Post category:OpenStack

Summarizing three days of the Nova Juno mid-cycle meetup is a pretty hard thing to do - I'm going to give it a go, but just in case I miss things, there is an etherpad with notes from the meetup at https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/juno-nova-mid-cycle-meetup. I'm also going to do it in the form of a series of posts, so as to not hold up any content at all in the wait for perfection. This post covers the mechanics of each day at the meetup, reviewer burnout, and the Juno release. First off, some words about the mechanics of the meetup. The meetup was held in Beaverton, Oregon at an Intel campus. Many thanks to Intel for hosting the event -- it is much appreciated. We discussed possible locations and attendance for future mid-cycle meetups, and the consensus is that these events should "always" be in the US because that's where the vast majority of our developers are. We will consider other host countries when the mix of Nova developers change. Additionally, we talked about the expectations of attendance at these events. The Icehouse mid-cycle was an experiment, but now that we've run two of these I think they're clearly useful events. I…

More turning

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 14, 2014
Post category:Wood

Some more pens, and then I went back to bowls for a bit. The attraction of pens is that I can churn out a pen in about 30 minutes, whereas a bowl can take twice that. Therefore when I have a small chance to play in the garage I'll do a pen, whereas when I have more time I might do a bowl. [icbm: home]

I’ve been making pens

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 14, 2014
Post category:Wood

So, I've been making pens for the last few months. Here are some examples. The first two are my first "commission", in that my brother in law asked for some pens for a friend's farewell gift. [icbm: home]

Expectations of core reviewers

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 13, 2014
Post category:OpenStack

One of the action items from the nova midcycle was that I was asked to make nova's expectations of core reviews more clear. This blog post is an attempt at that. Nova expects a minimum level of sustained code reviews from cores. In the past this has been generally held to be in the order of two code reviews a day, which is a pretty low bar compared to the review workload of many cores. I feel that existing cores understand this requirement well, and I am mostly stating it here for completeness. Additionally, there is increasing levels of concern that cores need to be on the same page about the criteria we hold code to, as well as the overall direction of nova. While the weekly meetings help here, it was agreed that summit attendance is really important to cores. Its the way we decide where we're going for the next cycle, as well as a chance to make sure that people are all pulling in the same direction and trust each other. There is also a strong preference for midcycle meetup attendance, although I understand that can sometimes be hard to arrange. My stance is that I'd like…

devpi as a pip cache

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 11, 2014
Post category:OpenStack

Richard Jones introduced me to devpi as a pip cache, and its pretty cool. He's written up a guide on his blog at http://mechanicalcat.net/richard/log/Python/devpi_quick_start. The basic idea is that it caches on demand, so you can have one of these for your home network and avoid downloading things over and over. Even better, it your machines share a linux ABI (think same Ubuntu release or whatever), then you can upload wheels and avoid all those repeated compiles.

Interesting things found whilst surfing

Post author:mikal
Post published:July 3, 2014
Post category:Link

Some interesting things I found recently that I think others might be interested in: A video of a cool 6 bit adder made from wood and marbles -- I think this will be really useful for explaining binary maths to my kids when they show an interest. (More detail). A wooden combination lock. There is also a page describing the build of the lock. A repeatable morticing jig for a table saw, with full build instructions. He also built a cool box joint jig with plans available. A pistol for playing jenga with an unfair advantage, that's my kind of cheating. You'll notice all of these videos are from Matthias Wandel. He has a YouTube channel and seems like my sort of geek. I am sure there will be more links from him as I work through his 7 years (!) of videos.

Configuring a spa3000 or spa3102

Post author:mikal
Post published:July 3, 2014
Post category:Voip

I've had a spa3000 for a long time and then it blew up. That meant I had to replace it with a spa3102, but without being able to refer to the configuration I had on the spa3000. It wasn't too bad, although the software on these devices is truly terrible (even with a modern firmware). Some pointers: Use the WAN port on the spa3102, even if you're only plugging in one ethernet port. Get firmware from Cisco. You can upload this to the spa3102 by putting it on a web server and then hitting http://SPA3102_IP/admin/upgrade?http://yourwebserver/firmware.bin. Then follow the instructions here. When you have problems with the dial plan, realize that Chris Yeoh has already solved this and go here. Finally, fix hangup detection by stealing the config line from here. Job done. Of course, there's no way to backup the config on one of these devices, so I am sure I will be back here again.

LCA2015 opens its Call for Proposals

Post author:mikal
Post published:June 11, 2014
Post category:Conference

LCA2015 will be in Auckland, New Zealand next year, and the Call for Proposals has just opened! The conference is one of the best venues in Australia and New Zealand to get word out about your Open Source project, as well as learning about the cool things that other people are doing. This is the third time the conference has been in New Zealand, and its looking to be an excellent event. This one call for proposals covers papers, tutorials, and mini conferences. For more information about the CFP, checkout http://lca2015.linux.org.au/cfp. Mini conference proposals should go to http://lca2015.linux.org.au/miniconf-cfp.