rackspace – Made by Mikal

Call for presentations for the linux.conf.au 2014 OpenStack mini-conference

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 5, 2013
Post category:Conference

I've just emailed this out to the relevant lists, but I figured it can't hurt to post it here as well... linux.conf.au will be hosting the second OpenStack mini-conference to run in Australia. The first one was well attended, and this mini-conference will be the first OpenStack conference to be held on Australia's west coast. The mini-conference is a day long event focusing on OpenStack development and operations, and is available to attendees of linux.conf.au. The mini-conference is therefore calling for proposals for content. Speakers at the mini-conference must be registered for linux.conf.au 2014 as delegates, or discuss their needs with the mini-conference organizers if that isn't possible. Some examples of talks we're interested in are: talks from OpenStack developers about what features they are working on for IceHouse; talks from deployers of OpenStack about their experiences and how others can learn from them; talks covering the functionality of OpenStack and how it can be used in new and interesting ways. Some important details: linux.conf.au runs from 6 to 10 January 2014 in Perth, Australia at the University of Western Australia the mini-conference will be on Tuesday the 7th of January proposals are due to the mini-conference organizer no later…

Exploring a single database migration

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 3, 2013
Post category:OpenStack

Yesterday I was having some troubles with a database migration download step, and a Joshua Hesketh suggested I step through the migrations one at a time and see what they were doing to my sqlite test database. That's a great idea, but it wasn't immediately obvious to me how to do it. Now that I've figured out the steps required, I thought I'd document them here. First off we need a test environment. I'm hacking on nova at the moment, and tend to build throw away test environments in the cloud because its cheap and easy. So, I created a new Ubuntu 12.04 server instance in Rackspace's Sydney data center, and then configured it like this: $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install -y git python-pip git-review libxml2-dev libxml2-utils libxslt-dev libmysqlclient-dev pep8 postgresql-server-dev-9.1 python2.7-dev python-coverage python-netaddr python-mysqldb python-git virtualenvwrapper python-numpy virtualenvwrapper sqlite3 $ source /etc/bash_completion.d/virtualenvwrapper $ mkvirtualenv migrate_204 $ toggleglobalsitepackages Simple! I should note here that we probably don't need the virtualenv because this machine is disposable, but its still a good habit to be in. Now I need to fetch the code I am testing. In this case its from my personal fork of nova, and the git…

Nova database continuous integration

Post author:mikal
Post published:July 4, 2013
Post category:OpenStack

I've had some opportunity recently to spend a little quality time off line, and I spent some of that time working on a side project I've wanted to do for a while -- continuous integration testing of nova database migrations. Now, the code isn't perfect at the moment, but I think its an interesting direction to take and I will keep pursuing it. One of the problems nova developers have is that we don't have a good way of determining whether a database migration will be painful for deployers. We can eyeball code reviews, but whether code looks reasonable or not, its still hard to predict how it will perform on real data. Continuous integration is the obvious solution -- if we could test patch sets on real databases as part of the code review process, then reviewers would have more data about whether to approve a patch set or not. So I did that. At the moment the CI implementation I've built isn't posting to code reviews, but that's because I want to be confident that the information it gathers is accurate before wasting other reviewers' time. You can see results at openstack.stillhq.com/ci. For now, I am keeping an…

Merged in Havana: fixed ip listing for single hosts

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 27, 2013
Post category:OpenStack

Nova has supported listing the fixed ips for a single host for a while. Well, except for that time we broke it by removing the database call it used and not noticing. My change to fix that situation has just landed, so this should now work again. To list the fixed ips used on a host, do something like: nova-manage fixed list hostname I will propose a backport to grizzly for this now.

Michael’s surprisingly unreliable predictions for the Havana Nova release

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 21, 2013
Post category:OpenStack

I should start out by saying that because OpenStack is an open source project, it is hard to know exactly what will land in Havana -- the developers are volunteers, and sometimes things get in the way of them doing the work they intended. However, these are the notes I wrote up on the high points of the summit for me -- I didn't see all the same sessions as other nova developers, so hopefully others will pitch in with their notes as well. Scheduler The scheduler seems to be a point of planned work for a lot of people in this release, with talk about having more scheduling code in the common library, and of adding new filter types. There is definite interest in being able to schedule by methods we don't currently support -- things like rack or PDU diversity, or trying to collocate a tenants machines together. HP is also interested in being able to sell dedicated machines to tenants -- in other words, they would guarantee that only one tenants instances appeared on a machine in return for a fee. At the moment this requires setting up a host aggregate for the tenant. Feeding additional data…

Faster pip installs

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 9, 2013
Post category:OpenStack

Last week with the help of the lovely openstack-infra people, I discovered that you can have a local cache of pip downloads. This speeds up rebuilding test environments when you need to jump between branches with different dependencies. Its as simple as chucking something like: export PIP_DOWNLOAD_CACHE=~/cache/pip ...into your .bashrc or equivalent.

Merged in Havana: configurable iptables drop actions in nova

Post author:mikal
Post published:April 1, 2013
Post category:OpenStack

LaunchPad bug 1013893 asked nicely if the drop action for iptables rules created by nova-network could be configured. The idea here is that you might want to do something other than a plain old drop -- for example logging before dropping. This has now been implemented in Havana. To configure the drop action, set the iptables_drop_action to the name of an already existing iptables target. Creating this target is not managed by nova, and you'll need to do it on every compute node. When iptables creates or deletes rules on compute nodes it will now use this new target. There's a bit of an upgrade problem here in that this will stop nova from deleting rules which use the old hard coded drop target. However, if an instance is torn down then all of its tables are torn down as well and rules will be deleted correctly, so this is only a problem if a security group is changed while the instance is running. It occurs to me that we can do better here, so I've sent off this review to handle the case where a rule is being removed and used the default drop action. For safety, I would…

Upgrade problems with the new Fixed IP quota

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 31, 2013
Post category:OpenStack

In the last few weeks a new quota has been added to Nova covering Fixed IPs. This was done in response to LaunchPad bug 1125468, which was disclosed as CVE 2013-1838. To be honest I think there are some things the vulnerability management team learned the hard way with this disclosure. For example, we didn't realize that we needed to update python-novaclient to allow users to set the quota, or that adding a quota would require changes in Horizon. Both of these errors have been corrected. More importanly, the default value of the new quota was set to 10. I made this decision based on the default value of the instances quota coupled with a desire to protect deployments from denial of service. However, this decision combined with a failure to explicitly call out the new quota in the release notes for the Folsom stable release have resulted in some deployers experiencing upgrade problems. This was drawn to our attention by LaunchPad bug 1161190. We have therefore moved to set the default quota for fixed IPs to unlimited. If you want to protect yourself from a potential DoS, then you should seriously consider changing this default value in your deployment.…

Havana Nova PTL elections

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 14, 2013
Post category:OpenStack

This is just a quick reminder that there are only a couple more days to vote in the Nova PTL elections for the Havana cycle. If you're eligible to vote, you should have a voting URL in your email. The candidates: Russell Bryant -- announcement Michael Still -- announcement The incumbent PTL, Vishvananda Ishaya, has chosen not to run.

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…