Over the last few weeks I built a new home lab based on the Supermicro A1SAi-2750F motherboard. Instead of manually configuring the required infrastructure services like DNS, NTP, OpenVPN and DHCP, I’m using Ansible to do all of it, in an easy and repeatable fashion. As a reminder Ansible is a YAML based configuration management tool, it’s agentless, use SSH as a communication medium. It’s simple and efficient. Read our intro article for more details. In this article I’ll details how to install a ISC DHCP server using Ansible. ISC DHCP is production-grade software that offers a complete solution for implementing DHCP servers, relay agents, and clients for small local networks to large enterprises. ...

Last week we reviewed all the tips & tricks to troubleshoot Open vSwitch and OpenStack Neutron. NSX vSphere (NSX-v) is a different beast, mostly because it leverage VMware Distributed Switch (VDS) instead of Open vSwitch. As a cheatsheet, I’m gathering all the CLI to troubleshoot it over here, for easy cut & past, some commands are damn long. But wait don’t forget the tab completion on our NSX CLI, it’s pretty nice ;) But you have to know where to start, hope this helps. ...

Open vSwitch comes embedded with Linux Kernel 3.3 and up, it became the cornerstone of Network Virtualisation. But if you start having connectivity issues, it’s better to have a great bit of knowledge to really understand it. This article is a cheatsheet that will help you achieve this goal. I hope ;) Open vSwitch features To give you a rough idea of all the greatness of Open vSwitch (OVS), here is a brief feature list, as of version 2.3. ...

Redhat announced a month ago OpenStack Platform 5.0 which officially support VMware NSX 6.0 and vSphere 5.5. In our lab today, we’ll deploy this OpenStack distribution and connect it to NSX and vSphere to see how easy it is and if everything works as expected. By the way it’s not, so beware, this article is just a preview of what’s coming. If you want to reproduce the same setup, you’ll have to wait until VMware officially support RedHat 7.0. This article will be updated accordingly when it will be publicly available. ...

It’s now time to give Ansible a chance to enter the battleground of OpenStack deployer tool. We’ll use Ansible 1.7 and Blue Box playbooks to achieve that goal. If you don’t have Ansible already installed, consult our previous article or the official documentation. You’ll see it’s quite easy. Ansible by itself doesn’t install the Operating system on Bare Metal. But Ansible author, Michael DeHaan, developped Cobbler a PXE solution back when working for Red Hat. So you can use this tool or any other tools like MAAS, Razor to install at least four Ubuntu 12.04 servers. ...

Summer is a great period to find ways to improve your workflow a bit. One great little tool in this category is Byobu from Dustin Kirkland, it’s a light, text-based window manager which allow you to detach/reattach to session and quickly create and move between different windows over a single SSH connection. It improve on the idea of previous tools like Tmux or GNU Screen but with a simpler approach. Installation Ubuntu: ...

I’ve been playing with cheatsheets for years, it all started when I studied mathematics. I still have few booklets back from university. I love cheatsheet to tell you the truth, the one thing I love the most is to reduce as much as possible the paper estate taken by information. I have the impression to memorize everything easily when I shrink it. Computers have changed that radically, back when the first programmable calculators appeared on the market, the first digital cheatsheet appeared. It was the beginning of a long story which bring us today to Cheat . A small Python command line program that will be on your side when for god sake you completely forgot the options to block a port using iptables or how to quickly share a file thru HTTP using Python, etc… ...

Ansible seems to be the simplest tool to centrally manage systems of any kind, Docker containers, AWS, Google Compute, Rackspace, OpenStack instances, VMware VMs, etc… There isn’t any dependencies on the managed system apart from Python 2.6. Ansible isn’t using any database or daemon and won’t install anything on the managed system, all operations are executed using SSH. In this article, I’ll details how to install it will introduce the main concepts and terminologies. You’ll then understand why companies like Evernote, Twitter, Nasa, Rackspace or Atlassian are all using this Configuration Management, deployment and orchestration tool Compared to other solutions like Chef, Puppet or SaltStack, Ansible is designed to be minimal in nature with low learning curve. ...