It has been awhile and a lot of things have been done in my cloud. My goal with this post is to first provide an update regarding the current state. Provide some lessons learned from an overall view. Second I want to redefine and reevaluate the direction of my cloud/IT in a box. Finally, I have some, what I think is some exciting news, potential growth opportunity, and great way to follow the work I’m doing. Maybe even a way for you guys to participate and help learn and shape this private cloud. Continue reading Private Cloud update and reconciliation
Cisco Small Business SG 200-08 Switch Shenanigans
First, the problem. As I have indicated in my previous article (Private Cloud Architecture) I have 4 Cisco Small Business SG 200-08 Switches that help make the network backbone of my Private Cloud. One issue I have had from day 1 of this setup is the inability to use NFS or RPC based technology. After getting frustrated at both lack of available verbosity surrounding why NFS was timing out, as well as my lack of knowledge surrounding NFS and RPC technology in general (I know how to do a simple NFS mount server and client, but nothing below that in the technology stack), I shelved the initiative to use NFS as well as the shared storage problem between Nova Compute Nodes. Fast Forward almost a year, I was finally at the point in my infrastructure that I was going to need to try it again. I tried many things and was given the suggestion, verify what you know in a known environment and slowly migrate it into the problem environment. Continue reading Cisco Small Business SG 200-08 Switch Shenanigans
Private Cloud Architecture
The post order is a bit wrong. But I was witnessing the same problem at a job. Lack of clear architecture. As I thought about it, I was currently no better, and I was a team of one, with no excuses. I recognized that with a lack of written architecture, I was having problems organizing and planning the project. And if a team of one was having a problem, imagine a team or even multiple teams with the same problem. But better late than never.
Before I can architect anything, I needed a goal. What was my elevator pitch for this project and why it should exist? Here is what I came up with.
An IT infrastructure and software development lifecycle in a box for my home projects, with the capability to grow and maintain a corporate-like and team enforcing workflow and best practice on the cheap.
Not a bad goal if I do say so. And I do š
Now I know what you are thinking. How can one breathe with a goal so high in the clouds? And my answer would be, that is exactly part of the solution. Cloud technology has come so far that we even have it available for free. Continue reading Private Cloud Architecture
A setback and the importance of backups
One would think, that someone who pushes the importance of backups so hard, regardless of HA and DR (which I maintain to this day), that they would have backups in place for their own infrastructure, right? Well, I didn’t, it was on my docket, but like many before me in their own respective environments, I pushed it off for a myriad of reasons. A couple of those revolve around the fact that I can not for the life of me figure out why whenever I attempt to mount NFS hosted from my FreeNAS server to any other box, it times out with the only error and log message being that it timed out with no lead in. Another reason being that I was working on stuff that was far more exciting, which is a low bar to begin with. Anything is more exciting than backups. And because of my rush for getting to the seemingly greener grass on the other side of the fence, I lost almost everything. My only saving grace is the inherit nature of Git being decentralized.
Alright, so enough beating myself up for my stupidity, let’s go over what happened, what I did, and what I am going to do. My OpenStack cluster was built using Packstack and the RDO project. Which for me, was a great way stand up OpenStack quickly to learn the ins and outs of OpenStack and get familiar with it without getting overwhelmed from the complexity that is OpenStack. I was looking to deploy Kubernetes within OpenStack in order start working with containers. However, the HeatĀ service was not installed, which was required to deploy Kubernetes quickly. So I edited my Packstack answer file to enable HEAT and reran Packstack. It failed because Keystone was throwing errors. Mainly it couldn’t find a column in a table of its database. This only started showing after I ran Packstack. So I started tweaking by hand and came across instructions for v3 of the keystone API, but not v2 which is what Packstack had installed. So I attempted to upgrade Keystone to v3. Upgraded fine, but it was still throwing the same database error.
After a few hours of fighting, and coming up with no reason for why the database would be missing columns, I gave up. I didn’t know enough about the database to be able to fix the problem, and my database/SQL-fu is lacking. I quickly becameĀ depressed shortly after making the realization that without Keystone working, absolutely nothing in OpenStack worked. Neutron, Nova, Horizon, everything depends on Keystone. Which judging by its very name I should have been able to guess even with no OpenStack experience. After pondering for a bit, an idea occurred to me. Continue reading A setback and the importance of backups