Older blog entries for mikal (starting at number 935)

Starship Troopers (again)




ISBN: 0441783589
Ace (1987), Edition: Reissue, Paperback, 272 pages
LibraryThing
I last read this book almost exactly four years ago. Its still a good read, and I didn't find it as ranty as last time. I do think this is a better story than the movie, as it has more depth. Overall a good read, if not a particularly deep one.

Tags for this post: book robert_a_heinlein combat hugo award combat_suit npr_top_100_sf
Related posts: The Forever War; Starship Troopers; Caves of Steel; Ender's Game; The Diamond Age ; Rendezvous With Rama


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Syndicated 2013-09-30 04:58:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Call for presentations for the linux.conf.au 2014 OpenStack mini-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 than 1 November
  • there are two types of talks -- full length (45 minutes) and half length (20 minutes)


CFP submissions are made by completing this online form: CFP submission form

If you have questions about this call for presentations, please contact Michael Still at openstack-lca2014@lists.stillhq.com for more details.

Tags for this post: conference lca2014 openstack mini-conference rackspace
Related posts: Faster pip installs; Merged in Havana: fixed ip listing for single hosts; Merged in Havana: configurable iptables drop actions in nova; Michael's surprisingly unreliable predictions for the Havana Nova release; Some quick operational notes for users of loop and nbd devices; Exploring a single database migration

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Syndicated 2013-09-04 18:55:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Exploring a single database migration

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 location to fetch will obviously change for other people:

Nova database continuous integration

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 eye on the test results and posting manually to reviews when an error is found -- that has happened twice so far.

The CI tests work by restoring a MySQL database to a known good state, upgrading that database from Folsom to Grizzly (if needed). It then runs the upgrades already committed to trunk, and then the proposed patch set. Timings for each step are reported -- for example with my biggest test database the upgrade from Folsom to Grizzly takes between about 7 and 9 minutes to run, which isn't too bad. You can see an example log at here.

I'd be interested in know if anyone else has sample databases they'd like to see checks run against. If so, reach out to me and we can make it happen.

Tags for this post: openstack rackspace database ci mysql
Related posts: MythBuntu 8.10 just made me sad; Time to document my PDF testing database; Managing MySQL the Slack Way: How Google Deploys New MySQL Servers; I won a radio shark and headphones!; Conference Wireless not working yet?; Drizzle Developer Day; MySQL scaling: query snipers; Links from Rasmus' PHP talk; Faster pip installs; Off to the MySQL tutorials; Recovering lost MythTV recordings; Links from Rasmus' PHP talk; MySQL Workbench; Off to the MySQL tutorials; Thoughts on the first day of the MySQL user's conference; VTA station for the Santa Clara Convention Center; Merged in Havana: fixed ip listing for single hosts; MySQL Workbench; Estimating the progress of queries on MySQL; Is there any way to access the match text in MySQL rlike selects?; Merged in Havana: configurable iptables drop actions in nova

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Syndicated 2013-07-03 03:30:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

We all know that the LCA2014 CFP is open, right?

I just want to make sure that everyone knows that the LCA2014 call for proposals is open. There are two calls this time around -- a call for proposals and a call for miniconfs. The call for proposals closes on 6 July, so you don't have heaps of time left to submit something.

So, if you're interested in speaking at linux.conf.au 2014, in Perth between 6 and 10 January 2014 you should hit up those CFPs now!

Tags for this post: conference lca2014 cfp
Related posts: LCA 2006: CFP closes today; Got Something to Say? The LCA 2013 CFP Opens Soon!; Call for papers opens soon

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Syndicated 2013-06-17 03:00:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Merged in Havana: fixed ip listing for single hosts

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.

Tags for this post: openstack havana fixed_ip nova rackspace
Related posts: Upgrade problems with the new Fixed IP quota; Merged in Havana: configurable iptables drop actions in nova; Michael's surprisingly unreliable predictions for the Havana Nova release; Havana Nova PTL elections; Faster pip installs; Some quick operational notes for users of loop and nbd devices; Further adventures with base images in OpenStack; OpenStack at linux.conf.au 2013; Moving on; Image handlers (in essex); Openstack compute node cleanup

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Syndicated 2013-04-26 00:56:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Michael's surprisingly unreliable predictions for the Havana Nova release

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 into scheduling decisions

There is also interest in being able to feed more scheduling information to the nova-scheduler. For example, ceilometer intends to start collecting monitoring data from nova-compute nodes, and perhaps it might inform nova-scheduler that a machine is running hot or has a degraded RAID array. This might also be the source of PDU or CRAC failure information which might affect scheduling decisions -- these later two examples are interesting because they are information where it doesn't make sense to get it from the compute node, the correct location for this information is a data center wide system, not an individual machine. There is concern about nova-scheduler depending on other systems, so these updates from ceilometer will probably be advisory updates, with nova-scheduler degrading gracefully if they are not present or are stale.

Mothballing

This was almost instantly renamed to "shelving", but "swallow / spew" was also considered. This is a request that Rackspace sees from customers -- basically the ability to stop a virtual machine, but keep the UUID and IP addresses associated with the machine as well as the block device mapping. The proposal is to implement this as a snapshot of the machine, and a new machine state. The local disk files for the instance might get deleted if the resources are needed. This would feel like a reboot of an instance to a user.

This is of interest for workloads like "Black Friday" web servers. You could bring a whole bunch up, configure security groups, load balancers, and the applications on the instances and then shelve the instance. When you need the instance to handle load, you'd then unshelve the instance and once it was booted it would just magically start serving. Expect to see shelves instances be cheaper than a running instance, but not free. This is mostly because IP addresses are scarce. Restarting a shelved instance might take a while if the snapshot has to be fetched to a compute node. If you need a more "instant on" bursting capacity, then just leave instances idling and pay full price.

Deferred instance file delete

This is a nice to have requirement for shelving instances, but it is useful for other things as well. This is the ability to delay the deletion of instance files when an instance is torn down. This might end up being expressed as "keep these files for at least X days, unless you are tight on disk resources". I can see other reasons this would be useful -- for example helping support people rescue data from instances users tore down and now want back. It also defers the disk IO from deleting the files until its absolutely necessary. We could also perhaps detect times when the disks are "relatively idle" and use those to clean up file systems.

DNS in nova-network

Expect to see the current DNS driver removed, as no one uses it as best as we can tell. This will be replaced with a simpler drive in nova-compute and the recommendation that deployers use quantum DNS if possible.

Quantum

There is continued work of making quantum the default networking engine for nova. There are still some missing features, but the list of absolutely blocking features is getting smaller. A lot of discussion centered around how to live upgrade clouds from nova-network to quantum. This is not an easy problem, but smart people are looking at it. The solution might involve moving compute nodes over to quantum, and then live migrating instances over to those compute nodes. However, we currently only support one network driver at a time in nova, so we will need to change some code here.

Long running periodic tasks

There will be a refactor of the periodic task code in nova this release to move periodic tasks which incur a lot of blocking IO into separate processes. These processes will be launched by nova-compute, and not be cron jobs or something like that. Most of the discussion was around how to do this safely (eventlet makes it exciting), which is nice in that it indicates some level of consensus that this is needed. The plan for now is to do this in nova-compute, but leave other nova components for later releases.

Libvirt changes

Libvirt is the compute driver I work on, so it's the only one I want to comment on here. The other drivers are doing interesting things as well, I just don't want to get details wrong by not understanding their efforts.

First off, there should be some work done on better console logging in Havana. At the moment we use an unbounded file on disk. This will hopefully become a Unix domain socket managing a ring buffer of some form. The Unix domain socket leaves the option open of later making this serial console interactive, but that's not an immediate goal.

There was a lot of talk about LXC support, and how we need to support file system attachments as well as block devices. There is also some cleanup that can be done for the LXC support in the libvirt to make the code cleaner, but it is not clear who will work on this.

imagebackend.py will probably get refactored, but in ways that don’t make a big difference to users but make it easier to code against (and therefore more reliable). I'm including it here just because I'm excited about that refactor making this code easier to understand.

There was a lot of talk about live migration and the requirement for ssh between compute nodes. Operators don't love that compute nodes can talk to each other, but expect Havana to include some sort of on demand ssh key management, and a later release to proxy that traffic through something like nova-conductor.

Incremental backups are of interest to deployers as well, but there is concern that glance needs more support for chains of images before we can do that.

Conclusion The summit was fantastic once again, and the Foundation did an awesome job of hosting it. It was however a pretty tiring experience, and I'm sure I got some stuff here wrong, or missed things that others would consider important. It would be cool for other developers to write up summaries of what they saw at the summit as well.

Tags for this post: openstack havana rackspace summit nova summary prediction
Related posts: Merged in Havana: configurable iptables drop actions in nova; Havana Nova PTL elections; Upgrade problems with the new Fixed IP quota; Faster pip installs; Some quick operational notes for users of loop and nbd devices; Further adventures with base images in OpenStack; OpenStack at linux.conf.au 2013; Moving on; Image handlers (in essex); Openstack compute node cleanup

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Syndicated 2013-04-19 23:20:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Faster pip installs

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:

Merged in Havana: configurable iptables drop actions in nova

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 recommend only using this flag on new compute nodes that have no instances running in order to make this simple.

Tags for this post: openstack havana nova iptables
Related posts: Further adventures with base images in OpenStack; Havana Nova PTL elections; Upgrade problems with the new Fixed IP quota; Openstack compute node cleanup

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Syndicated 2013-03-30 21:13:00 from stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

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