OpenStack – Just another Linux geek

21 March, 202221 March, 2022Fedora, FOSS, OpenStack

Joining a bridged IRC network on Element (Matrix)

Matrix is a great modern, distributed and secure open source chat platform (I connect through Element), but sometimes you need to connect to IRC networks. Fortunately, for some common networks […]

13 January, 202218 January, 2022Fedora, FOSS, OpenStack

Swift object storage clusters with Ansible

OpenStack Swift is a most brilliant object store and I have built a few clusters over the last couple of years using SwiftStack’s product, which is really excellent. However, I […]

25 March, 202026 March, 2020Fedora, FOSS, OpenStack

Updating OpenStack TripleO Ceph nodes safely one at a time

Part of the process when updating Red Hat’s TripleO based OpenStack is to apply the package and container updates, viaupdate run step, to the nodes in each Role (like Controller, […]

21 March, 202022 March, 2020Fedora, FOSS, OpenStack

Using Ansible and dynamic inventory to manage OpenStack TripleO nodes

TripleO based OpenStack deployments use an OpenStack all-in-one node (undercloud) to automate the build and management of the actual cloud (overcloud) using native services such as Heat and Ironic. Roles […]

15 March, 202020 April, 2020Fedora, OpenStack

Using network namespaces with veth to NAT guests with overlapping IPs

Sets of virtual machines are connected to a virtual bridges (e.g. virbr0 and virbr1) and as they are isolated, can use the same subnet range and set of IPs. However, […]

3 March, 20203 March, 2020Fedora, FOSS, OpenStack

Using Ansible to define and manage KVM guests and networks with YAML inventories

I wanted a way to quickly spin different VMs up and down on my KVM dev box, to help with testing things like OpenStack, Swift, Ceph and Kubernetes. Some of […]

17 November, 201917 November, 2019Fedora, OpenStack

Use swap on NVMe to run more dev KVM guests, for when you run out of RAM

I often spin up a bunch of VMs for different reasons when doing dev work and unfortunately, as awesome as my little mini-itx Ryzen 9 dev box is, it only […]

28 September, 201928 September, 2019Fedora, OpenStack

Using pipefail with shell module in Ansible

If you’re using the shell module with Ansible and piping the output to another command, it might be a good idea to set pipefail. This way, if the first command […]

8 September, 201915 September, 2021Fedora, FOSS, OpenStack

Setting up a monitoring host with Prometheus, InfluxDB and Grafana

Prometheus and InfluxDB are powerful time series database monitoring solutions, both of which are natively supported with graphing tool, Grafana. Setting up these simple but powerful open source tools gives […]

10 June, 201910 June, 2019Fedora, FOSS, OpenStack, Tech

Securing Linux with Ansible

The Ansible Hardening role from the OpenStack project is a great way to secure Linux boxes in a reliable, repeatable and customisable manner. It was created by former colleague of […]