A lot of things have been happening. First, one of my builds (my storage server) continued to have a faulty motherboard that I had to keep exchanging and continued to be DOA. What made this motherboard more tempting was that the motherboard was mini-itx, had more than enough SATA ports on the board making it so I didn’t need an additional hard drive controller card, integrated CPU and fan less heat sink, ECC memory support, and finally IPMI. However because I was always getting DOA boards I contacted NewEgg and despite the board only having a replacement only warranty they allowed me to instead turn it back in for store credit so I can instead purchase a different motherboard. The new parts arrived and I will be putting it together tonight and will be taking notes to publish my build guide.

All while I was dealing with a bad motherboard I ran into a problem with my OpenStack dev box. The block storage service known as Cinder was not properly configuring persistent data drives that I wanted to use. They were always created with an error. With that came a revelation to me that I was not properly learning OpenStack and its commands because I had let PackStack configure it for me. While easy and relatively quick, left me feeling unsure if I was doing things right in my setup and even more confused and unsure when something was broken. In response to that I decided to pick up a course for OpenStack through Linux Academy. So everyday I’ve been watching videos on the bus ride to/from work and doing the excercises when I got home. I’ve been learning a lot and plan to put it all to use when I create my production instance of OpenStack home cloud.

With that said I am getting close to finishing the next entry in my Private cloud series, which will be configuring the network switches and the hosts. I’m looking forward to posting what I learn and hopefully helping you make your own as well.