Older blog entries for mikal (starting at number 910)

30 Dec 2012 (updated 1 Jan 2013 at 06:09 UTC) »

OpenStack at linux.conf.au 2013

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:
      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 Overview - John Dickinson
    • JORN and the rise and fall of clustering - Jamie Birse
    • MongoDB Replication & Replica Sets - Stephen Steneker
    • MariaDB Galera Cluster - Grant Allen
    • The Grand Distributed Storage Debate: GlusterFS and Ceph going head to head - Florian Haas, Sage Weil, Jeff Darcy


Tuesday
  • The OpenStack Miniconf: this is a mostly-clear winner for Tuesday. Tristan Goode has been doing a fantastic job of organizing this miniconf, which might not be obvious to people who haven't been talking to him a couple of times a week about its progress like me. I think people will be impressed with the program, which includes:
    • Welcome and Introduction - Tristan Goode
    • Introduction to OpenStack - Joshua McKenty
    • Demonstration - Sina Sadeghi
    • NeCTAR Research Cloud: OpenStack in Production - Tom Fifeld
    • Bare metal provisioning with OpenStack - Devananda van der Veen
    • Intro to Swift for New Contributors - John Dickinson
    • All-around OpenStack storage with Ceph - Florian Haas
    • Writing API extensions for Nova - Christopher Yeoh
    • The OpenStack Metering Project - Angus Salkeld
    • Lightweight PaaS on the NCI OpenStack Cloud - Kevin Pulo
    • Enabling Compute Clusters atop OpenStack - Enis Afgan
    • Shared Panel with Open Government
  • The Open Government Miniconf: this is the other OpenStack relevant miniconf on Tuesday. This might seem like a bit of a stretch, but as best as I can tell there is massive interest in government at the moment in deploying cloud infrastructure, and now is the time to be convincing the decision makers that open clouds based on open source are the right way to go. OpenStack has a lot to offer in the private cloud space, and we need to as a community make sure that people are aware of the various options that are out there. This is why there is a shared panel at the end of the day with the OpenStack miniconf.


Wednesday
    There aren't any OpenStack talks on Wednesday, but I am really hoping that someone will propose an OpenStack BoF via the wiki. I'd sure go to a BoF.


Thursday
  • Playing with OpenStack Swift by John Dickinson
  • Ceph: Managing A Distributed Storage System At Scale by Sage Weil


Friday
  • Heat: Orchestrating multiple cloud applications on OpenStack using templates by Angus Salkeld and Steve Baker
  • How OpenStack Improves Code Quality with Project Gating and Zuul by James Blair
  • Ceph: object storage, block storage, file system, replication, massive scalability, and then some! by Tim Serong and Florian Haas
  • ... and another yet to be announced talk


So, if you're interested in OpenStack and haven't considered linux.conf.au 2013 as a conference you might be interested in, now would be a good time to reconsider before we sell out!

Tags for this post: openstack conference lca2013 rackspace
Related posts: Contact details for the Canberra LCA 2013 bid; Got Something to Say? The LCA 2013 CFP Opens Soon!; On conference t-shirts; LCA 2013 bid process opens - Canberra at the ready!; The mechanics of bidding for LCA; It seems stickers are a gas; Moving on; Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?; Announcement video; linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013; Image handlers (in essex); Canberra officially expresses interest in hosting LCA in 2013; Call for papers opens soon; Canberra's LCA2013 bid

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Syndicated 2012-12-29 20:29:00 (Updated 2013-01-01 06:09:57) from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Image handlers (in essex)

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 -d /dev/nbd15 
I don't understand why the mount of the first partition is necessary and what it happens when the partition is mounted.
This is a bit harder than the first bit of the question. What I think is happening is that there are files being injected, and that's causing the mount. Just because the admin password isn't being inject doesn't mean that other things aren't being injected still. You'd be able to tell what's happening by grepping your logs for "Injecting .* into image" and seeing what shows up.

Tags for this post: openstack loop nbd libvirt file_injection rackspace
Related posts: Some quick operational notes for users of loop and nbd devices; Moving on

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Syndicated 2012-12-22 15:51:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

The Forever War (again)




ISBN: 9780312536633
LibraryThing
Still excellent.

Tags for this post: book joe_haldeman reread


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Syndicated 2012-12-15 21:58:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Some quick operational notes for users of loop and nbd devices

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.

Tags for this post: openstack loop nbd operations

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Syndicated 2012-12-15 16:28:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Starquake




ISBN: 0345312333
Del Rey (1986), Edition: First Thus, Mass Market Paperback
LibraryThing
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.

Tags for this post: book robert_l_forward hard alien aliens cheela
Related posts: Dragon's Egg; Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens: Humanity; Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens: Maverick; Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens: Changeling; Speaker For The Dead; Jupiter; Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens: Alliance; The Robot City, Robots and Aliens Series; The Coming; Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens: Intruder; Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens: Renegade


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Syndicated 2012-12-13 18:45:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Moving on

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.

Tags for this post: openstack canonical rackspace
Related posts: Taking over a launch pad project; Got Something to Say? The LCA 2013 CFP Opens Soon!; Slow git review uploads?; On conference t-shirts; Further adventures with base images in OpenStack; Wow, qemu-img is fast; Reflecting on Essex; Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?; Announcement video; linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013; The next thing; Folsom Dev Summit sessions; A first pass at glance replication; Call for papers opens soon; Openstack compute node cleanup

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Syndicated 2012-12-08 12:56:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Fuzzy Nation




ISBN: 9780765367037
LibraryThing
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.

Tags for this post: book john_scalzi sentience mining colony


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Syndicated 2012-11-14 22:51:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Mockingjay




ISBN: 9781407109374
LibraryThing
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.

Tags for this post: book suzanne_collins combat hunting post_apocalypse hunger_games human_shield
Related posts: The Hunger Games; Catching Fire; Death Bringer; Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow ; East of the Sun, West of the Moon; Canned hunting; Bolos 1: Honor of the Regiment; Iron Master; Cloud Warrior; Amtrak Wars; Earth Thunder; First Family; Emerald Sea; Body Armor: 2000; Without Warning; Blood River; Against the Tide; The Stars Must Wait; Bolos 2: The Unconquerable; There Will Be Dragons


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Syndicated 2012-11-14 22:43:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

On conference t-shirts

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.

What I want to specifically talk about here is the conference t-shirts though. We started out with the following criteria -- we wanted to provide a men's cut, and a separate women's cut, because we recognize that unisex t-shirts are not a good solution for most women. We also need a wider than usual size range in those shirts because we have a diverse set of delegates attending our event. We also didn't really want to do black, dark blue, or white shirts -- mostly because those colours are overdone, but also because the conference is in January when the mean temperature is around 30 degrees Celsius.

Surprisingly, those criteria eliminate the two largest vendors of t-shirts in Australia. Neither Hanes nor Gildan make any t-shirt that has both men's and women's cuts, in interesting colours and with a large size variety. So we went on the hunt for other manufacturers. However, I'm jumping a little ahead of myself here, so bear with me.

First off we picked a Hanes shirt because we liked the look of it. We were comfortable with that choice for quite a while before we discovered that the range of colours available in both the men's and women's cut was quite small. Sure, there are heaps of colours in each cut, but the overlapping set of colours is much smaller than it first appears. At this point we knew we needed to find a new vendor.

The next most obvious choice is Gildan. Gildan does some really nice shirts, and I immediately fell in love with a colour called "charcoal". However, once bitten twice shy, so we ordered some sample t-shirts for my wife and I to try out. I'm glad we did this, because the women's cut was a disaster. First off it didn't fit my wife very well in the size she normally wears, which it turns out is because the lighter cotton style of t-shirt is 10 centimeters smaller horizontally than the thicker cotton version! It got even worse when we washed the shirts and tried them again -- the shirt shrunk significantly on first wash. We also noticed something else which had escaped our attention -- the absolute largest size that Gildan did in our chosen style for women was a XXL. Given the sizing ran small, that probably made the largest actual size we could provide a mere XL. That's not good enough.

Gildan was clearly not going to work for us. I got back on the phone with the supplier who was helping us out and we spent about an hour talking over our requirements and the problems we were seeing with the samples. We even discussed getting a run of custom shirts made overseas and shipped in, but the timing wouldn't work out. They promised to go away and see what other vendors they could find in this space. Luckily for us they came back with a vendor called BizCollection, who do soft cotton shirts in the charcoal colour I like.

So next we ordered samples of this shirt. It looked good initially -- my shirt fit well, as did my wife's. However, we'd now learnt that testing the shirts through a few wash cycles was useful. So then my wife and I wore the shirts as much as we could for a week, washing them each evening and abusing them in all the ways we could think of -- using the dryer, hanging them outside in the sun, pretty much everything apart from jumping up and down on them. I have to say these shirts have held up well, and we're very happy with them.

The next step is I'm going to go back and order a bunch more sample shirts and make my team wear them. The goal here is to try and validate the size charts that the vendor provides and make sure that we can provide as much advice about fit as possible to delegates. Also, I love a free t-shirt.

After all this we still recognize that some people will never be happy with the conference's t-shirt. Perhaps they hate the colour or the design, or perhaps they're very tall and every t-shirt is too short for them. So the final thing we're doing is we're giving delegates a choice -- they can select between a t-shirt, a branded cap, or a reusable coffee cup. In this way we don't force delegates to receive something they don't really want and are unlikely to use.

When you register for the conference, please try to remember that we've put a lot of effort as an organizing team into being as detail oriented as possible with all the little things we think delegates care about. I'm sure we've made some mistakes, but we are volunteers after all who are doing our best. If you do see something you think can be improved I'd ask that you come and speak to us privately first and give us a chance to make it right before you complain in public.

Thanks for reading my rant about conference t-shirts.

Tags for this post: conference lca2013 swag t-shirts canonical
Related posts: Taking over a launch pad project; Got Something to Say? The LCA 2013 CFP Opens Soon!; Slow git review uploads?; Further adventures with base images in OpenStack; Wow, qemu-img is fast; Reflecting on Essex; Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?; Announcement video; linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013; The next thing; Folsom Dev Summit sessions; A first pass at glance replication; Call for papers opens soon; Openstack compute node cleanup

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Syndicated 2012-09-21 14:42:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

The Tuloriad




ISBN: 9781439134092
LibraryThing
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.

Tags for this post: book john_ringo tom_kratman aliens combat personal_ai rejuv legacy_of_the_aldenata religion
Related posts: Watch on the Rhine; Yellow Eyes; Hell's Faire; Cally's War; Gust Front; A Hymn Before Battle; When the Devil Dances; The Last Colony ; Runner; The Diamond Age ; The Accidental Time Machine ; Patron saints; Logos Run; Polar City Blues; Snow Crash ; Old Man's War ; The Ghost Brigades ; Jupiter; Old Man's War (2); The Ghost Brigades (2)


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Syndicated 2012-09-08 22:14:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

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