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This is just a quick update to note that this blog migrated to a new host last night. Everything seems to have gone pretty smoothly, other than the fact that they didn't tell me when they were going to do it and shut down the old host immediately. As a result, there was some downtime. If you do happen to notice anything still not working correctly please let me know.

This was the first repeat OpenStack Summit location for me. While there have been repeat locations in the past, I wasn't at the first Summit at any of those locations. I think that means I'm getting old. :-)

There was a lot that had changed, and also a lot that stayed the same. The Vancouver Convention Center is still a fantastic venue, with plenty of space for sessions. And although I did attend all of the Oslo sessions, just like last time, we didn't over-schedule Oslo this time so I had a chance to attend some non-Oslo sessions as well. Since I'm also focusing on Designate these days, I made sure to catch all of those sessions, even the one at 5:30 PM on Thursday when everyone was a bit tired and ready to leave. And it was good - there was useful information in that presentation. I felt more productive at this Summit than last time, which is certainly a good thing.

With the intro out of the way, let's get down to the nuts and bolts of the sessions I attended.

Background

At long last, OVB has reached the goal we set for it way back when it was more idea than reality. The plan was to come up with a system where we could test baremetal deployment against OpenStack instances in an arbitrary cloud. That would allow something like TripleO CI to scale, for all practical purposes, infinitely. For years this wasn't possible because OVB required some configuration and/or hacks that were not appropriate for production clouds, which limited it to use in specific CI-oriented clouds. Theoretically it has been possible to use OVB on normal clouds for a couple of years now, but in practice public clouds were either running OpenStack versions that were too old or didn't expose the necessary features. Fortunately, this is no longer true.

It seems like every time I try to access the remote console on one of my old DRAC 5's, something fails. The latest failure was kind of new and I didn't find any blog posts specifically discussing it, so I'm writing one. The error was the classic "Error when reading from ssl socket connection". But the usual fixes didn't work.

The title is a bit dramatic, but I'm bad at naming things and that's the name of the project I'm writing about today.

As with many people, I like my todo list to be very low overhead. I don't want a huge task tracking system with all the bells and whistles. Those are for management's benefit. I want a list of things that I need to do and a way to keep track of which ones I've completed. If my todo list has a lot of overhead then I won't use it consistently and it becomes worse than useless because it provides a false sense of security that I'm tracking all the work I need to do. There are a million todo apps out there, but none that I've found were able to satisfy my desire for minimalism.

So I wrote my own (Deja vu much?)

I recently did a system update and a few things quit working. One of them was viewing HTML pages over SFTP. I do this on a fairly regular basis because I have a separate development system where I do a lot of coding work. Part of this is looking at coverage reports that are output in HTML format. It's extremely handy to be able to just fire up Konqueror and view those files directly from the other system. Here's how I fixed it:

About a year ago I got fed up with all the dynamic Zuul status pages (like this one). They're extremely heavyweight pages that make my browser grind almost constantly and there's no way to disable the auto-refresh while you're looking through the list. At least not that I found, and when I asked on openstack-dev the responses agreed.

So I wrote my own.

I have complained extensively over the past couple of years about the over-automation of developer environments in TripleO. But wait, you say, isn't automation a good thing? And yes, it is, but the automation needs to happen in the right places (feel free to append "IMHO" to anything in this post ;-). The problem with a bunch of developer-specific automation is that it hides very real user experience problems because the developers just use their simplified interface and never touch the regular user interface. Essentially it's the opposite of dogfooding, which is something I feel is critical to writing good software. This is also known as the "Works in Devstack" problem for OpenStack as a whole (I will not be tackling that problem here though).

So if I don't like what most people are doing today, what would I prefer? That will be the topic of this post. I'll discuss what I do, and possible areas for improvement.

I was asked to look into integrating Ansible Tower with TripleO a while back. It actually wasn't that difficult to do, but I've finally gotten around to recording a demo video showing how. In this post I will also provide a brief overview of how I installed Ansible Tower.

My laptop has 12 GB of memory and is largely used for web, email, IRC, and ssh to other systems. You might think that would be sufficient. You would be wrong.