mikal – Page 41 – Made by Mikal

OpenStack at linux.conf.au 2013

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 5, 2013
Post category:OpenStack

As some of you might know, I'm the Director for linux.conf.au 2013. I've tried really hard to not use my powers for evil and make the entire conference about OpenStack -- in fact I haven't pulled rank and demanded that specific content be included at all. However, the level of interest in OpenStack has grown so much since LCA 2012 that there is now a significant amount of OpenStack content in the conference without me having to do any of that. I thought I'd take a second to highlight some of the OpenStack content that I think is particularly interesting -- these are the talks I'll be going to if I have the time (which remains to be seen): Monday Cloud Infrastructure, Distributed Storage and High Availability Miniconf: while not specifically about OpenStack, this miniconf is going to be a good warm up for all things IaaS at the conference. Here's a list of the talks for that miniconf:<ul Delivering IaaS with Apache CloudStack - Joe Brockmeier oVirt - Dan Macpherson Aeolus - Dan Macpherson Ops: From bare metal to cloud space - Phil Ingram VMs on VLANs on Bridges on Bonds on many NICs - Kim Hawtin OpenStack Swift…

Image handlers (in essex)

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 23, 2012
Post category:OpenStack

George asks in the comments on my previous post about loop and nbd devices an interesting question about the behavior of this code on essex. I figured the question was worth bringing out into its own post so that its more visible. I've edited George's question lightly so that this blog post flows reasonably. Can you please explain the order (and conditions) in which the three methods are used? In my Essex installation, the "img_handlers" is not defined in nova.conf, so it takes the default value "loop,nbd,guestfs". However, nova is using nbd as the chose method. The handlers will be used in the order specified -- with the caveat that loop doesn't support Copy On Write (COW) images and will therefore be skipped if the libvirt driver is trying to create a COW image. Whether COW images are used is configured with the use_cow_images flag, which defaults to True. So, loop is being skipped because you're probably using COW images. My ssh keys are obtained by cloud-init, and still whenever I start a new instance I see in the nova-compute.logs this sequence of events: qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd15 /var/lib/nova/instances/instance-0000076d/disk kpartx -a /dev/nbd15 mount /dev/mapper/nbd15p1 /tmp/tmpxGBdT0 umount /dev/mapper/nbd15p1 kpartx -d /dev/nbd15 qemu-nbd…

The Forever War (again)

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 17, 2012
Post category:Book

Still excellent.

Some quick operational notes for users of loop and nbd devices

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 16, 2012
Post category:OpenStack

A quick note for OpenStack operators -- if you are using loop or nbd devices to mount disk images in nova-compute, then you would be well served to have plenty of device files hanging around to reduce contention. For loop devices, that seems as simple as making more of them with MAKEDEV. With nbd, you'll also need to increase the value of the max_nbd_devices flag to nova-compute. The latter is improved in grizzly, where we will autodetect nbd devices.

Starquake

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 15, 2012
Post category:Book

The sequel to the very excellent Dragon's Egg, this book covers the continued interaction between the humans and the super cute Cheela. Unfortunately for the Cheela they suffer a major natural disaster which destroys society. I love an author who is willing to kill of characters when it progresses the story, and there is lots of that happening in this book. Really enjoyable. [isbn: 0345312333]

Moving on

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 9, 2012
Post category:OpenStack

Thursday this week is my last day at Canonical. After a little over a year at Canonical, I'm moving on to the private cloud team at Rackspace -- my first day with Rackspace will be the 17th of December. I'm very excited to be joining Rackspace -- I'm excited by the project, the team, and the opportunity to make OpenStack even better. We've also talked about some interesting stuff we'd like to do in the Australian OpenStack community, but I'm going to hold off on talking about that until I've had a chance to settle in. I am appreciative of my time at Canonical -- when I joined I was unaware of the existence of OpenStack, and without Canonical I might never have found this awesome project that I love. I also had the chance to work with some really smart people who taught me a lot. This move is about spending more time on OpenStack than Canonical was able to allow.

Fuzzy Nation

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 16, 2012
Post category:Book

Yet another excellent Scalzi novel. This one took me a while to really warm up to, but it was worth the patience. The ending is fast paced and excellent. [isbn: 9780765367037]

Mockingjay

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 16, 2012
Post category:Book

This is the final book in the Hunger Games trilogy. To be honest I don't think it is as the previous two books. This is mostly because while the plot is quiet believable, Katniss simply comes across as whiney for most of the book. The plot is believable so it doesn't feel insincere, its just annoying. Overall an OK book but not her best. [isbn: 9781407109374]

On conference t-shirts

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 22, 2012
Post category:Conference

Conference t-shirts can't be that hard, right? I certainly don't remember them being difficult when Canberra last hosted linux.conf.au in 2005. I was the person who arranged all the swag for that conference, so I should remember. Yet here I am having spent hours on the phone with vendors, and surrounded with discarded sample t-shirts, size charts and colour swatches. What changed? The difference between now and then is that in the intervening seven years the Australian Linux community has started to make real effort to be more inclusive. We have anti-harassment policies, we encourage new speakers, and we're making real efforts to encourage more women into the community. linux.conf.au 2013 is making real efforts to be as inclusive as possible -- one of the first roles we allocated was a diversity officer, who is someone active in the geek feminism community. We've had serious discussions about how we can make our event as friendly to all groups as possible, and have some interesting things along those lines to announce soon. We're working hard to make the conference a safe environment for everyone, and will have independent delegate advocates available at all social events, as well as during the conference.…

The Tuloriad

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 10, 2012
Post category:Book

This book's underlying premise isn't really my thing. The escape of the remnants of the Posleen works for me, and I think holds together. However, I'm unconvinced by a religious mission setting out after the Posleen to convert them to one of the Earth religions. That just seems a bit far fetched to me. However, this book is rescued by the insights into the Posleen's history that it offers. Its worth wading through the other stuff that isn't all that interesting just to find out a bit more about how the characters ended up in this state. [isbn: 9781439134092]