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I've discussed my local OpenStack installation before, such as here and here. One of the results of the changes I've made to it over time is that I have some instances that are booted from volume. Unfortunately, instances booted from volume don't snapshot properly with the nova image-create. Below is the quick and dirty method I've been using to take snapshot backups of those vms for a while now.

Edit Jan. 26, 2015: After discussing this with the Oslo team some more, I discovered that almost everything I said here was already covered quite well in the drop namespaces spec (that I reviewed... ;-). You're probably just as well off going and reading that, but I'm going to leave this here just in case it happens to help get the word out.

The Why

During the Kilo cycle the Oslo team has been busy deprecating the oslo. namespace in all of our projects. The first question this probably raises for most people is: why? Unfortunately the answer to that is not simple, and I'm not sure I understand some of the deeper details of it myself. However, after having talked to some of the Python packaging folks that hang around the OpenStack project we came to the conclusion that namespace packages in Python 2 are just too broken for us to continue using them.

So it's been a couple of weeks since I got back from the Paris Summit, but it's been a busy time and I haven't had time to write up all of my thoughts about it. Here's my belated attempt to do that.

Back when I first started working out of my house I set up a PXE boot server to make it easer to install Fedora on new boxes. That worked well for a while, but at some point I ran into some issues where the PXE boots would fail right after the boot message "Reached target Basic System". It would hang at that step for a while, then after a few minutes Dracut would report a couple of warnings, most interesting of which was "Warning: /dev/root does not exist".

Edit: Updated 2015/3/19 with more current diffs of my changes.

At the Atlanta OpenStack Summit we had a session on something called QuintupleO, otherwise known as "TripleO wasn't confusing enough, let's add another layer" :-) Barring a few specific concerns from other teams, which I believe have now been addressed to their satisfaction, everyone seemed to be on board with the idea. But what exactly is QuintupleO, and where does it stand today? Read on to find out.

As I mentioned in a previous post, about a year ago I picked up a 1U server from EBay to use as a local single-node OpenStack environment. In general I was quite happy with it, but at some point I got tired of paying for electricity to run a fairly power-hungry server that sits idle, or close to it, about 95% of the time. The fans also picked up an annoying whine somewhere along the line, so once I discovered how much more efficient a modern desktop processor would be, while actually performing better than the old dual server ones, I decided it was time for a new box. This post will be the story of my journey to get Tempest running in an acceptable fashion on it, and what I learned along the way.

Most OpenStack projects use a combination of tox, testr, and subunit to run their unit tests. This works fine as long as you don't have any simple errors in your code, such as a typo in an import or a missing closing paren. In those cases testr or subunit may swallow the error and you won't know exactly where it is (I hear this may be fixed in some version of the tools, but the one I'm currently using still has this limitation). To fix this, we need another way to run unit tests that will expose the actual error to us.

One of the unintended consequences of Feature Freeze in OpenStack is that a lot of new features get merged in a hurry at the end of the cycle. That's obviously not ideal, but it's a reality we all have to live with for now. TripleO has been bitten by this a few times recently, and the long gate queue that also goes along with Feature Freeze means sometimes fixes for problems take a long time (days) to merge in the other projects. In the gate we have tempreverts and cherry-picks to mitigate that problem, but for local devtest those features are not available. Fortunately there's another solution.

I've recently been trying to enable the Dracut deploy ramdisks I posted about earlier for RHEL7. I've been running into some issues that weren't present on the other platforms I've tested so far, and because of that I want to ask for some help from some Dracut experts. Unfortunately, the problem I'm having occurs so early in the Dracut boot process that it hasn't started any device management yet, so attaching a disk to collect logs doesn't work immediately.

A little less than a year ago I picked up an old Dell CS24-SC 1U server from EBay. It's got a ton of power - dual quad core, 24 GB of RAM, 4 146 GB 15k SAS drives, and an integrated BMC. That last is something I've struggled with though. Because this is a server, I really don't want to leave a keyboard and mouse plugged in to it all the time. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get the remote KVM functionality working. Until now, that is.