Tag Archives: openstack

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 mine Major Hayden and while it was spun out of OpenStack, it can be applied generally to a number of the major Linux distros (including Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, SUSE).

The role is based on the Secure Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) out of the Unites States for RHEL, which provides recommendations on how best to secure a host and the services it runs (category one for highly sensitive systems, two for medium and three for low). This is similar to the Information Security Manual (ISM) we have in Australia, although the STIG is more explicit.

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Patches for OpenStack Ironic Python Agent to create Buildroot images with Make

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Recently I wrote about creating an OpenStack Ironic deploy image with Buildroot. Doing this manually is good because it helps to understand how it’s pieced together, however it is slightly more involved.

The Ironic Python Agent (IPA) repo has some imagebuild scripts which make building the CoreOS and TinyCore images pretty trivial. I now have some patches which add support for creating the Buildroot images, too.

The patches consist of a few scripts which wrap the manual build method and a Makefile to tie it all together. Only the install-deps.sh script requires root privileges, if it detects missing dependencies, all other Buildroot tasks are run as a non-privileged user. It’s one of the great things about the Buildroot method!

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Creating an OpenStack Ironic deploy image with Buildroot

Edit: See this post on how to automate the builds using buildimage scripts.

Ironic is an OpenStack project which provisions bare metal machines (as opposed to virtual).

A tool called Ironic Python Agent (IPA) is used to control and provision these physical nodes, performing tasks such as wiping the machine and writing an image to disk. This is done by booting a custom Linux kernel and initramfs image which runs IPA and connects back to the Ironic Conductor.

The Ironic project supports a couple of different image builders, including CoreOS, TinyCore and others via Disk Image Builder.

These have their limitations, however, for example they require root privileges to be built and, with the exception of TinyCore, are all hundreds of megabytes in size. One of the downsides of TinyCore is limited hardware support and although it’s not used in production, it is used in the OpenStack gating tests (where it’s booted in virtual machines with ~300MB RAM).

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Git hook to help with OpenStack development

I wrote a small Git hook which may be useful in helping OpenStack devs run tests (and any script they like) before a commit is made (see Superuser magazine article).

This way we can save everyone time in the review process by fixing simple issues before they break in the check-pipeline.

Installation is easy (see the GitHub page) and all prompts default to no, so that the dev can easily just hit Enter to skip and continue (but still be reminded).

Setting up OpenStack Ansible All-in-one behind a proxy

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Setting up OpenStack Ansible (OSA) All-in-one (AIO) behind a proxy requires a couple of settings, but it should work fine (we’ll also configure the wider system). There are two types of git repos that we should configure for (unless you’re an OpenStack developer), those that use http (or https) and those that use the git protocol.

Firstly, this assumes an Ubuntu 14.04 server install (with at least 60GB of free space on / partition).

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