Having published a transcript of the talk I gave last year at OSDC 2012, I stupidly decided I’d better do the same thing with this year’s OSDC 2013 talk. It’s been edited slightly for clarity (for example, you’ll find very few “ums” in the transcript) but should otherwise be a reasonably faithful reproduction.
It’s Hack Week again. This time around I decided to look at running TripleO on openSUSE. If you’re not familiar with TripleO, it’s short for OpenStack on OpenStack, i.e. it’s a project to deploy OpenStack clouds on bare metal, using the components of OpenStack itself to do the work. I take some delight in bootstrapping of this nature – I think there’s a nice symmetry to it. Or, possibly, I’m just perverse.
Anyway, onwards. I had a chat to Robert Collins about TripleO while at PyCon AU 2013. He introduced me to diskimage-builder and suggested that making it capable of building openSUSE images would be a good first step. It turned out that making diskimage-builder actually run on openSUSE was probably a better first step, but I managed to get most of that out of the way in a random fit of hackery a couple of months ago. Further testing this week uncovered a few more minor kinks, two of which I’ve fixed here and here. It’s always the cross-distro work that seems to bring out the edge cases.
Then I figured there’s not much point making diskimage-builder create openSUSE images without knowing I can set up some sort of environment to validate them. So I’ve spent large parts of the last couple of days working my way through the TripleO Dev/Test instructions, deploying the default Ubuntu images with my openSUSE 12.3 desktop as VM host. For those following along at home the install-dependencies script doesn’t work on openSUSE (some manual intervention required, which I’ll try to either fix, document, or both, later). Anyway, at some point last night, I had what appeared to be a working seed VM, and a broken undercloud VM which was choking during cloud-init:
Calling http://169.254.169.254/2009-04-04/meta-data/instance-id' failed Request timed out
Figuring that out, well… There I was with a seed VM deployed from an image built with some scripts from several git repositories, automatically configured to run even more pieces of OpenStack than I’ve spoken about before, which in turn had attempted to deploy a second VM, which wanted to connect back to the first over a virtual bridge and via the magic of some iptables rules and I was running tcpdump and tailing logs and all the moving parts were just suddenly this GIANT COSMIC DANCE in a tiny little box on my desk on a hill on an island at the bottom of the world.
It was at this point I realised I had probably been sitting at my computer for too long.
It turns out the problem above was due to my_ip being set to an empty string in /etc/nova/nova.conf on the seed VM. Somehow I didn’t have the fix in my local source repo. An additional problem is that libvirt on openSUSE, like Fedora, doesn’t set uri_default="qemu:///system". This causes nova baremetal calls from the seed VM to the host to fail as mentioned in bug #1226310. This bug is apparently fixed, but apparently the fix doesn’t work for me (another thing to investigate), so I went with the workaround of putting uri_default="qemu:///system" in ~/.config/libvirt/libvirt.conf.
So now (after a rather spectacular amount of disk and CPU thrashing) there are three OpenStack clouds running on my desktop PC. No smoke has come out.
I think I had it right last night. There is a giant cosmic dance being performed in a tiny little box on my desk on a hill on an island at the bottom of the world.
Or, I’ve been sitting at my computer for too long again.
Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel
— Roadhouse, The Doors
It’s been a bit over two and a half months since I rolled my car on an icy corner on the way to the last day of PyCon Au 2013. My body works properly again modulo some occasional faint stiffness in my right side and I’ve been discharged by my physiotherapist, so I thought publishing some retrospective thoughts might be appropriate.
I thought I’d start this post with some classic Dire Straits, largely for the extreme tech culture shock value, but also because “MTV” has the same number of syllables as “NBN”. I’ll wait while you watch it.
Now that that’s out of the way, I thought it might be interesting to share my recent NBN experience. Almost a year ago I said “Yay NBN! Bring it on! Especially if I don’t get stuck on satellite”. Thankfully it turns out I didn’t get stuck on satellite, instead I got NBN fixed wireless. For the uninitiated, this involves an antenna on your roof, pointed at a nearby tower:
An NTD (Network Terminating Device) is affixed to a wall inside your house:
The box on the left is the NTD, the box on the right is the line from the antenna on the roof. Not pictured are the four ports on the bottom of the NTD, one of which is now plugged into a BoB Lite from iiNet. According to the labels on the NTD, the unit remains the property of NBN Co, and you’re not allowed to tamper with it:
Getting online is easy. Whatever you plug into the NTD just gets an IP address via DHCP – there’s none of that screwing around with PPPoE usernames and passwords. The BoB Lite lets you configure one of its ethernet ports as a “WAN source” instead of using ADSL, which is what I’m doing. Alternately you could plug in a random Linux box and use that as a router, or even just plug your laptop straight in, which is what I did later when trying to diagnose a fault.
The wireless itself is LTE/4G, but unlike 4G on your mobile phone (which gets swamped to a greater or lesser degree when lots of people are in the same place), each NBN fixed wireless tower apparently serves a set number of premises (see the fact sheet PDF), so speed should remain relatively consistent. Here’s the obligatory speed tests, first from my ADSL connection:
And here’s what I get via NBN wireless:
Boo-yah!
Speaking as someone who works from home and who has to regularly download and upload potentially large amounts of data, this is a huge benefit. Subjectively, random web browsing doesn’t seem wildly different than before, but suddenly being able to download openSUSE ISOs, update test VMs, and pull build dependencies at ~2 megabytes per second has markedly decreased the amount of time I spend sitting around waiting. And let’s not leave uploads out of the picture here – I push code up to github, I publish my blog, I upload tarballs, I contribute to wikis. I’ve seen too much discussion of FTTP vs. FTTN focus on download speed only, which seems to assume that we’re all passive consumers of MTV videos. OK, fine, I’m on wireless and FTTP is never going to be an option where I live, but I don’t want anyone to lose sight of the fact that being able to produce and upload content is a vital part of participating in our shiny new digital future. A reliable connection with decent download and upload speed is vital.
Now that I’ve covered the happy part of my NBN experience, I’ll also share the kinks and glitches for completeness. I rang up to get connected on August 1st. At the time, the next available installation appointment was August 21st. On that day I got a call saying the technician wouldn’t be able to make it because his laptop was broken. I offered to let them use my laptop instead, but apparently this isn’t possible, so the installation was rescheduled for September 6th. All attempts at escalating this (i.e. getting the subsequent 2.5 week delay reduced, because after all it was their fault they had a broken laptop) failed. By the time the right person at iiNet was able to rattle enough sabres in the direction of NBN Co, the new installation date was close enough that it didn’t make a difference anymore. To be clear, as far as I can tell, iiNet is not at fault; the problem seems to be one of bureaucracy combined with probable understaffing/overdemand of NBN Co (apparently this newfangled interwebs thingy is popular). As an aside, I mentioned the “broken laptop” problem to a friend, who said a friend of his had also had installation rescheduled with the same excuse. I’m not quite sure what to make of that, but I will state for the record that I seriously doubt our new fearless leaders would have been able to make matters any better had they been in power at the time.
Anyway, installation finally went ahead and all was sweetnees and light for just under three weeks, until one of those wacky spring days where it’s sun, then howling wind, then sideways rain, then sun again, then two orange signal strength lights and a red ODU light:
ODU stands for Outdoor Unit, which is apparently the antenna. For at least an hour, the lights cycled between red and green ODU, and two orange / three green signal strength. Half an hour on the phone to iiNet support, as well as plugging a laptop directly into the NTD didn’t get me anywhere. I managed to get a DHCP lease on my laptop very briefly at one point, but otherwise the connection was completely hosed. The exceptionally courteous and helpful woman in iiNet’s Fibre team logged a fault with NBN Co, and I switched my ADSL – which I had kept for just such an emergency – back on, so that I could get some work done.
The next day everything was green, so I plugged back into the NTD. About an hour after this, I got a call from the same woman at iiNet saying they’d noticed I had a connection again and had thus cancelled the fault, but that she was going to keep an eye on things for a little while, and would check back with me over the next week or two. I also received an SMS with her direct email address, so I can advise her of any further trouble. I’ve since got smokeping running here against what I hope is a useful set of remote hosts so I’ll notice if anything goes freaky while I’m asleep or otherwise away from my desk:
I really wish I knew how to get a console on the NTD, or view some logs. I was told it’s basically a dumb box, but surely it knows a bit more internally than it indicates on the blinkenlights. As I said on twitter the other day, I feel like a mechanic trapped in the drivers seat of a car, with access only to the dashboard lights. Oh, well, fingers crossed…
Recording this for posterity.
Ingredients:
Procedure:
The video for my WTF is OpenStack talk (along with all the other PyCon AU 2013 videos) made it onto YouTube some time in the last few days. Here it is:
Credit where credit is due; this presentation was based on “Cloud Computing with OpenStack: An Introduction” by Martin Loschwitz from Hastexo. Thanks Martin!
This is the story of how I rolled my car and somehow didn’t die on the way to the last day of PyCon Au 2013. I’m writing this partly for catharsis (I think it helps emotionally to talk about events like this) and partly in the hope that my experience will remind others to be safe on the roads. If you find descriptions of physical and mental trauma distressing, you should probably stop reading now, but rest assured that I am basically OK.
Continue reading
I gave an introductory “WTF is OpenStack” talk at the OpenStack miniconf at PyCon-AU this morning. For the uninitiated, this eventually boiled down to defining OpenStack as:
A framework that allows you to efficiently and dynamically manage virtualization and storage, so your users can request computing power and disk space as they need it.
It was suggested, given recent developments, that I might change this to:
A framework that allows you to efficiently and dynamically manage ALL THE THINGS!
Leaving that aside for the moment though, several people pointed out that my state transition diagram serves to very clearly elucidate how the various pieces of OpenStack interact when someone wants to deploy a VM. Here is is for posterity:
There’s also an etherpad covering the day’s talks at https://etherpad.openstack.org/pyconau-os-hack. Note that the images in the above diagram (aside from the hand-drawn Tim) are courtesy of Martin Loschwitz.
A few related (or semi-related) bits and pieces which turned up over the last month or so. The first is a video I was sent from onlinemba.com, entitled Telecommuting is Good for You and Good for Business. It cites a few studies showing greater productivity, reduced turnover and eco-friendliness (which I would tend to agree with based on personal experience). Unfortunately I can’t seem to see links to the studies themselves, but you should go watch it anyway, because it’s one of those cute “live animated” things, which I’m a sucker for.
That leads neatly to the second thing, which is from the iiNet blog, entitled The benefits of working from home. As with the above video, Yahoo gets a prominent mention for not allowing telework (although reports on that seem to be somewhat mixed). Anyway, benefits cited include lack of commute, lower overhead and fewer distractions, but the blog post does also make the very good point that you need to figure out whether or not telework is actually right for you. It also offers some tips I tend to agree with.
Now we get to the semi-related bit. Assuming telework is right for you, you want a good internet connection. As I’ve said before, “Yay NBN! Bring it on!“. As much disenchantment as I have with the major parties, this is something Labor is actually doing right. For an easy-to-appreciate comparison of what Labor and the LNP are proposing, check out How Fast is the NBN. Teleworkers, pay particular attention to the simulated Dropbox sync.
Carrying on from my last post, the failed chef-client run came down to the init script in ceph 0.56 not yet knowing how to iterate /var/lib/ceph/{mon,osd,mds} and automatically start the appropriate daemons. This functionality seems to have been introduced in 0.58 or so by commit c8f528a. So I gave it another shot with a build of ceph 0.60.
On each of my ceph nodes, a bit of upgrading and cleanup. Note the choice of ceph 0.60 was mostly arbitrary, I just wanted the latest thing I could find an RPM for in a hurry. Also some of the rm invocations won’t be necessary, depending on what state things are actually in:
# zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dalgaaf:/ceph:/extra/openSUSE_12.3/home:dalgaaf:ceph:extra.repo # zypper ar -f http://gitbuilder.ceph.com/ceph-rpm-opensuse12-x86_64-basic/ref/next/x86_64/ ceph.com-next_openSUSE_12_x86_64 # zypper in ceph-0.60 # kill $(pidof ceph-mon) # rm /etc/ceph/* # rm /var/run/ceph/* # rm -r /var/lib/ceph/*/*
That last gets rid of any half-created mon directories.
I also edited the Ceph environment to only have one mon (one of my colleagues rightly pointed out that you need an odd number of mons, and I had declared two previously, for no good reason). That’s knife environment edit Ceph on my desktop, and set "mon_initial_members": "ceph-0" instead of "ceph-0,ceph-1".
I also had to edit each of the nodes, to add an osd_devices array to each node, and remove the mon role from ceph-1. That’s knife node edit ceph-0.example.com then insert:
"normal": {
...
"ceph": {
"osd_devices": [ ]
}
...
Without the osd_devices array defined, the osd recipe fails (“undefined method `each_with_index’ for nil:NilClass”). I was kind of hoping an empty osd_devices array would allow ceph to use the root partition. No such luck, the cookbook really does expect you to be doing a sensible deployment with actual separate devices for your OSDs. Oh, well. I’ll try that another time. For now at least I’ve demonstrated that ceph-0.60 does give you what appears to be a clean mon setup when using the upstream cookbooks on openSUSE 12.3:
knife ssh name:ceph-0.example.com -x root chef-client [2013-04-15T06:32:13+00:00] INFO: *** Chef 10.24.0 *** [2013-04-15T06:32:13+00:00] INFO: Run List is [role[ceph-mon], role[ceph-osd], role[ceph-mds]] [2013-04-15T06:32:13+00:00] INFO: Run List expands to [ceph::mon, ceph::osd, ceph::mds] [2013-04-15T06:32:13+00:00] INFO: HTTP Request Returned 404 Not Found: No routes match the request: /reports/nodes/ceph-0.example.com/runs [2013-04-15T06:32:13+00:00] INFO: Starting Chef Run for ceph-0.example.com [2013-04-15T06:32:13+00:00] INFO: Running start handlers [2013-04-15T06:32:13+00:00] INFO: Start handlers complete. [2013-04-15T06:32:13+00:00] INFO: Loading cookbooks [apache2, apt, ceph] [2013-04-15T06:32:13+00:00] INFO: Processing template[/etc/ceph/ceph.conf] action create (ceph::conf line 6) [2013-04-15T06:32:13+00:00] INFO: template[/etc/ceph/ceph.conf] updated content [2013-04-15T06:32:13+00:00] INFO: template[/etc/ceph/ceph.conf] mode changed to 644 [2013-04-15T06:32:13+00:00] INFO: Processing service[ceph_mon] action nothing (ceph::mon line 23) [2013-04-15T06:32:13+00:00] INFO: Processing execute[ceph-mon mkfs] action run (ceph::mon line 40) creating /var/lib/ceph/tmp/ceph-ceph-0.mon.keyring added entity mon. auth auth(auid = 18446744073709551615 key=AQC8umZRaDlKKBAAqD8li3u2JObepmzFzDPM3g== with 0 caps) ceph-mon: mon.noname-a 192.168.4.118:6789/0 is local, renaming to mon.ceph-0 ceph-mon: set fsid to f80aba97-26c5-4aa3-971e-09c5a3afa32f ceph-mon: created monfs at /var/lib/ceph/mon/ceph-ceph-0 for mon.ceph-0 [2013-04-15T06:32:14+00:00] INFO: execute[ceph-mon mkfs] ran successfully [2013-04-15T06:32:14+00:00] INFO: execute[ceph-mon mkfs] sending start action to service[ceph_mon] (immediate) [2013-04-15T06:32:14+00:00] INFO: Processing service[ceph_mon] action start (ceph::mon line 23) [2013-04-15T06:32:15+00:00] INFO: service[ceph_mon] started [2013-04-15T06:32:15+00:00] INFO: Processing ruby_block[tell ceph-mon about its peers] action create (ceph::mon line 64) mon already active; ignoring bootstrap hint [2013-04-15T06:32:16+00:00] INFO: ruby_block[tell ceph-mon about its peers] called [2013-04-15T06:32:16+00:00] INFO: Processing ruby_block[get osd-bootstrap keyring] action create (ceph::mon line 79) 2013-04-15 06:32:16.872040 7fca8e297780 -1 monclient(hunting): authenticate NOTE: no keyring found; disabled cephx authentication 2013-04-15 06:32:16.872042 7fca8e297780 -1 unable to authenticate as client.admin 2013-04-15 06:32:16.872400 7fca8e297780 -1 ceph_tool_common_init failed. [2013-04-15T06:32:18+00:00] INFO: ruby_block[get osd-bootstrap keyring] called [2013-04-15T06:32:18+00:00] INFO: Processing package[gdisk] action upgrade (ceph::osd line 37) [2013-04-15T06:32:27+00:00] INFO: package[gdisk] upgraded from uninstalled to [2013-04-15T06:32:27+00:00] INFO: Processing service[ceph_osd] action nothing (ceph::osd line 48) [2013-04-15T06:32:27+00:00] INFO: Processing directory[/var/lib/ceph/bootstrap-osd] action create (ceph::osd line 67) [2013-04-15T06:32:27+00:00] INFO: Processing file[/var/lib/ceph/bootstrap-osd/ceph.keyring.raw] action create (ceph::osd line 76) [2013-04-15T06:32:27+00:00] INFO: entered create [2013-04-15T06:32:27+00:00] INFO: file[/var/lib/ceph/bootstrap-osd/ceph.keyring.raw] owner changed to 0m [2013-04-15T06:32:27+00:00] INFO: file[/var/lib/ceph/bootstrap-osd/ceph.keyring.raw] group changed to 0 [2013-04-15T06:32:27+00:00] INFO: file[/var/lib/ceph/bootstrap-osd/ceph.keyring.raw] mode changed to 440 [2013-04-15T06:32:27+00:00] INFO: file[/var/lib/ceph/bootstrap-osd/ceph.keyring.raw] created file /var/lib/ceph/bootstrap-osd/ceph.keyring.raw [2013-04-15T06:32:27+00:00] INFO: Processing execute[format as keyring] action run (ceph::osd line 83) creating /var/lib/ceph/bootstrap-osd/ceph.keyring added entity client.bootstrap-osd auth auth(auid = 18446744073709551615 key=AQAOl2tR0M4bMRAAatSlUh2KP9hGBBAP6u5AUA== with 0 caps) [2013-04-15T06:32:27+00:00] INFO: execute[format as keyring] ran successfully [2013-04-15T06:32:28+00:00] INFO: Chef Run complete in 14.479108446 seconds [2013-04-15T06:32:28+00:00] INFO: Running report handlers [2013-04-15T06:32:28+00:00] INFO: Report handlers complete
Witness:
ceph-0:~ # rcceph status
=== mon.ceph-0 ===
mon.ceph-0: running {"version":"0.60-468-g98de67d"}
On the note of building an easy-to-deploy Ceph appliance, assuming you’re not using Chef and just want something to play with, I reckon the way to go is use config pretty similar to what would be deployed by this Chef cookbook, i.e. an absolute minimal /etc/ceph/ceph.conf, specifying nothing other than initial mons, then use the various Ceph CLI tools to create mons and osds on each node and just rely on the init script in Ceph >= 0.58 to do the right thing with what it finds (having to explicitly specify each mon, osd and mds in the Ceph config by name always bugged me). Bonus points for using csync2 to propagate /etc/ceph/ceph.conf across the cluster.