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. ...
Last year I published an article that detailled a deployment of OpenStack Grizzly using Rackspace private cloud solution, let’s update it to the latest 4.2.1 version. You can stick on v4.1.3 if you want to stick on Grizzly instead of OpenStack Havana. First of all let’s details what’s new since version 4.0. The newer 4.2.x branch now support: OpenStack Havana code base. Load Balancing as a Service in OpenStack Networking (Neutron) using the HAProxy service provider. full OpenStack Metering implementation (Ceilometer) OpenStack Orchestration (Heat) is now available as a tech preview with standard Heat and CloudWatch API. It can be enabled afterward by applying the Heat role to the controller node after deployment. Quantum has been renamed to Neutron L3 Agent now available, it enables floating IPs and routers. LVM is now the default provider for Cinder But the biggest evolution is the fact that RackSpace Private Cloud is now declared Production Ready, yeah !!! ...
In this article we will review all the steps required to deploy NSX 4.0 a Network Virtualisation offering from VMware. We will nest this lab within an OpenStack cloud but you can run the lab anywhere else where you can launch VMs, including vSphere, Virtual Box or VMware Fusion. OpenStack Networking In our environment each kvm VM will be connected to distinct networks using different virtual interfaces. We first have to create four logical networks within our OpenStack cloud. It’s a funny exercice to deploy NSX nested inside NSX ! ...
Ruby is an important tool to have around, Mac OS X already comes bundled with it, but sometimes you need a different version. Mavericks now comes with Ruby 2.0.0-p195, any previous ones comes with 1.8.7 which is very close to end of life. There are lots of alternative to install multiple version of Ruby on your workstation, rvm or rbenv works well for this job but Postmodern have another angle to this problem. Quite similar to the Arch Linux Kiss (Keep It Simple, Stupid) philosophy, chruby is a deadly simple tool to do just that by updating the environment variables: $RUBY_ROOT, $RUBY_ENGINE, $RUBY_VERSION, $GEM_ROOT, $GEM_HOME, $GEM_PATH and $RUBYOPT in just 90 lines of codes. Let’s details how you can install it on your Mac. ...
Matt Ray is the community manager of a project at Chef (formerly Opscode) to unify all efforts around building up Chef Cookbooks for OpenStack deployment. For quite some time lots of people were forking the repository from Rackspace, it created a lot of fragmentation, so Matt is now gathering all around the StackForge repository where everyone can contribute. AT&T, Dell, Dreamhost, Gap, HP, HubSpot, IBM, Korea Telecom, Rackspace, SUSE amongst others are already contributing to this project. In this article we will detail how you can use them to deploy OpenStack on your environment. ...
For quite some time now the Crowbar team have been refactoring their cloud unboxer solution. It is is not yet ready for public consumption, but if you want to see what they’ve got, it’s already possible. Victor Lowther have just released the first CB20 compatible workload which is Ceph, a distributed storage solution from Inktank. This article will build up on the previous one which details the process of building a Crowbar ISO, let see how it differs if you want to see the latest and greatest of Crowbar 2.0. If you really don’t know what we are talking about, just start from the beginning. ...