jebpages

a blog

  • Upgrading the Family PC to Fedora 17, and Cinnamon

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    This weekend I upgraded our family PC to Fedora 17. I’ve been running this latest release for a while on my regular work machine and on my various (and generally short-lived) test systems, but I tend to be slower on the distro upgrade draw with the family computer. For me, slow usually means upgrade within two weeks of release, but this time around, it took me almost two months to undertake the upgrade.

    I did try upgrading from Fedora 16 to Fedora 17 about a month ago, using Fedora’s preupgrade feature, but the preupgrade process failed for me right at the end–following the lengthy process of downloading every package needed for the upgrade–with a complaint (if I recall correctly) about grub2-tools being missing. I checked to confirm that the grub2-tools package was indeed installed before shelving the upgrade effort for a while. Even though I’m always hot to upgrade to the latest and greatest, my wife maintains a “don’t be changing my computer all around” attitude.

    I resolved to retry the upgrade after reading about how the Cinnamon desktop environment of Linux Mint fame had made its way into the official Fedora repositories. See, my wife’s “don’t change stuff” prime directive had clashed pretty directly with the GNOME 3 “hey, let’s change everything” design philosophy, and the Cinnamon desktop environment was supposed to be a better fit for users still pining for the familiarity of GNOME 2.

    I started out as one of those piners, but after a few months using GNOME Shell, I got used to it, but I still install the GNOME Tweak Tool right off the bat in order to roll back some of the more annoying user interface defaults in GNOME Shell. Really, I don’t understand why it wasn’t possible for the GNOME 3 designers to make the shift from the v2 to the v3 user interface a bit more welcoming for its existing user base. What’s so bad about keeping a panel around, or allowing files and folders to show up on the desktop, or having minimize and maximize buttons in your window decorations?

    I’m sort of going off track from the upgrade tale here, but to me, the Cinnamon desktop environment points pretty clearly to a direction that the GNOME designers could have taken–the fancy OS X-style expose modes are still around in Cinnamon, but so are the familiar panels with app menus and window lists. Also, Cinnamon includes plenty of options for configuring basic settings, like fonts. I still can’t believe that you have to download a separate tool (the aforementioned gnome-tweak-tool) to change the fonts you use in GNOME 3.

    On Fedora 16, my wife’s login was set use a Compiz-based GNOME 2-workalike session by default, and my login was set to use the default GNOME Shell option. Unfortunately, something about this combination broke fast user switching, so my login didn’t end up getting much use. Post-upgrade, my wife’s Cinnamon session and my GNOME Shell session get along much better–we’re able to swap between our login sessions as expected.

    For the upgrade itself, I opted to upgrade from a copy of the F17 DVD that I’d written onto a USB key. The upgrade ran through without issue, putting in place some 1200+ new packages. What was weird, though, was that once I booted into my newly-upgraded system, I found tons of F16 packages still in place. I ran a “yum distribution-synchronization” to get up to date, and again, some 1200+ packages required updating. I’m not sure what happened there, but between that and my experience with preupgrade, I’m reminding myself to chip in some QA love on upgrade matters as the F17-to-F18 switchover approaches.

    My wife’s spent a few hours now on her newly Cinnamonized desktop, and her experiences have been delightfully uneventful. Low-impact system administration FTW!

  • Looking Ahead to oVirt 3.1

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    We’re about one week away from the release of oVirt 3.1, and I’m getting geared up by sifting through the current Release Notes Draft, in search of what’s working, what still needs work, and why one might get excited about installing or updating to the new version.

    Web Admin

    In version 3.1, oVirt’s web admin console has picked up a few handy refinements, starting with new “guide me” buttons and dialogs sprinkled through the interface. For example, when you create a new VM through the web console, oVirt doesn’t automatically add a virtual disk or network adapter to your VM. You add these elements through a secondary settings pane, which can be easy to overlook, particularly when you’re getting started with oVirt. In 3.1, there’s now a “guide me” window that suggests adding the nic and disk, with buttons to press to direct you to the right places. These “guide me” elements work similarly elsewhere in the web admin console, for instance, directing users to the next right actions after creating a new cluster or adding a new host.

    Storage

    Several of the enhancements in oVirt 3.1 involve the project’s handling of storage. This version adds support for NFSv4 (oVirt 3.0 only supported NFSv3), and the option of connecting external iSCSI or FibreChannel LUNs directly to your VMs (as opposed to connecting only to disks in your data or iso domains.

    oVirt 3.1 also introduces a slick new admin console for creating and managing Gluster volumes, and support for hot-pluggable disks (as well as hot pluggable nics). With the Gluster and hotplug features, I’ve had mixed success during my tests so far–there appear to be wrinkles left to iron out among the component stacks that power these features.

    Installer

    One of the 3.1 features that most caught my eye is proof-of-concept support for setting up a whole oVirt 3.1 install on a single server. The feature, which is packaged up as “ovirt-engine-setup-plugin-allinone” adds the option to configure your oVirt engine machine as a virtualization host during the engine-setup process. In my tests, I’ve had mixed success with this option during the engine-setup process–sometimes, the local host configuration part of the setup fails out on me.

    Even when the engine-setup step hasn’t worked for me, I’ve had no trouble adding my ovirt-engine machine as a host by clicking the “Hosts” tab in the web admin console, choosing the menu option “New,” and filling out information in the dialog box that appears. All the Ethernet bridge fiddling required from 3.0 (see my previous howto) is now handled automatically, and it’s easy to tap the local storage on your engine/host machine through the “Configure Local Storage” menu item under “Hosts.”

    Another new installer enhancement offers users the option of tapping a remote postgres database server for storing oVirt configuration data, in addition to the locally-hosted postgres default.

    oVirt 3.1 now installs with an HTTP/HTTPS proxy that makes oVirt engine (the project’s management server) accessible on ports 80/443, versus the 8080/8443 arrangement that was the default in 3.0. This indeed works, though I found that oVirt’s proxy prevented me from running FreeIPA on the same server that hosts the engine. Not the end of the world, but engine+identity provider on the same machine seemed like a good combo to me.

    Along similar lines, oVirt 3.1 adds support for Red Hat Directory Server and IBM Tivoli Directory Server as identity providers, neither of which I’ve tested so far. I’m interested to see if the 389 directory server (the upstream for RHDS) will be supported as well.

  • preupgrade gone wrong

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    Having reached a good break point in my Gluster/Openstack/Fedora tests, I thought I’d preupgrade the F16 VM I’ve been using for ovirt engine to F17, en route to the oVirt 3.1 beta.

    That didn’t go so well. During the post-preupgrade part (uh, the upgrade), the installer balked at upgrading the jboss-as package that shipped with oVirt 3.0. Afterward, the VM wouldn’t boot correctly.

    Fortunately, I was prepared for failure, detaching my iso domain in advance, and shuttling the templates and VMs I wanted to keep to the export domain, which I also detached.

  • Fedora 17, OpenStack Essex & Gluster 3.3: All Smushed Together

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    Within the past couple weeks, Fedora and Gluster rolled out new versions, packed with too many features to discuss in a single blog post. However, a couple of the stand-out updates in each release overlap neatly enough to tackle them together–namely, the inclusion of OpenStack Essex in Fedora 17 and support for using Gluster 3.3 as a storage backend for OpenStack.

    I’ve tested OpenStack a couple of times in the past, and I’m happy to report that while the project remains a fairly complicated assemblage of components, the community around OpenStack has a done a good job documenting the process of setting up a basic test rig. Going head to head with Amazon Web Services, even with the confines of one’s own organization, won’t be a walk in the park, but it’s fairly easy to get OpenStack up an running in a form suitable for further learning and experimentation.

    OpenStack on Fedora 17

    The getting started with OpenStack on Fedora 17 howto that I followed for my latest test involves quite a bit of command line cut and paste, but it didn’t take long for me to go from a minimal install Fedora 17 virtual machine to a single node OpenStack installation, complete with compute, image hosting, authentication, and dashboard services–everything I needed to launch VMs, register images, and manage everything from the comfort of a web UI.

    A couple of notes, I did everything on this minimal-install Fedora machine as root–since this is a soon-to-be blown-away test VM, I didn’t bother to create additional users. You may need to sprinkle in some sudos if you’re running as non-root. Also, I hit at least one issue with SELinux (related to glance) during my tests. I never turn off SELinux by default, but once I hit an error on a test box, I throw it into permissive mode.

    Also, I elected to run the whole show (the openstack part of it, at least) within a single virtual machine running on my home oVirt installation, so the performance of my guest instances was very slow, but everything worked well enough for me to take OpenStack for a spin, and get to fiddling with trickier OpenStack topics, such as…

    The one OpenStack element that the Fedora howto touches on only briefly is OpenStack Swift, the object storage system intended to replace Amazon’s S3. Here’s what the howto has to say about Swift:

    These are the minimal steps required to setup a swift installation with keystone authentication, this wouldn’t be considered a working swift system but at the very least will provide you with a working swift API to test clients against, most notably it doesn’t include replication, multiple zones and load balancing.

     

    (Configure swift with keystone)

    What an ideal segue for Gluster 3.3, a storage software project with replication and load balancing as its stock in trade. The Gluster portion of my tests was quite a bit trickier than the OpenStack on Fedora part had been, but I learned a lot about Gluster and OpenStack along the way.

    Building Gluster 3.3 Packages

    First off, Gluster 3.3 shipped a bit after Fedora 17, and the version of Gluster available in the Fedora software repositories is still at 3.2. What’s more, the 3.3 packages offered by the Gluster project target Fedora 16, as well. The Fedora folder on the Gluster download server doesn’t include any source rpms, but I found a spec file for building Fedora rpms in the Gluster source tarball on the download server.

    On my Fedora 17 notebook, I fetched the build dependencies for Gluster 3.2 using the command yum-builddep from the yum-utils package:

    sudo yum-builddep glusterfs

    I grabbed the file glusterfs.spec from the glusterfs-3.3.0.tar.gz tarball, dropped it in ~/rpmbuild/SPECS, and put the tarball into ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES. If you don’t have rpm-build installed on your Fedora machine, you’ll need to do that, as well.

    Next, I built my Gluster 3.3 packages for F17:

    rpmbuild -bb ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/glusterfs.spec

    Then, I copied the packages over to my OpenStack test machine and updated the glusterfs and glusterfs-fuse packages that had been pulled in as dependencies during my OpenStack on F17 install:

    scp ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/glusterfs-* root@openstackF17:/root
    ssh root@openstackF17 yum install -y ./glusterfs-3.3.0-1.fc17.x86_64.rpm glusterfs-fuse-3.3.0-1.fc17.x86_64.rpm

    Gluster+OpenStack: The Easy Way

    As described on the Connecting with OpenStack Resource Page on the Gluster wiki, there are two ways of using Gluster with OpenStack. The first is super simple, and amounts to locating the images for your running OpenStack instances on Gluster by simply mounting a Gluster volume at the spot where OpenStack expects to place these images. On the resource page, there’s a PDF titled OpenStack VM Storage Guide that steps through the process of creating a four node distributed-replicated volume and mounting it in the right spot. Easy.

    I did this with my test OpenStack setup, and it worked as advertised. I kicked off a yum update operation in one of my OpenStack instances, and then ungracefully shutdown (pulled the virtual plug on) the gluster VM node where the instance was calling home. I watched as the yum update process paused for a short time before continuing happily enough on one of the other Gluster nodes I’d configured.

    Where things got quite a bit trickier was with the second OpenStack-Gluster integration option, that for Unified Object and File Storage. Gluster’s UFO is based on a slightly modified version of OpenStack Swift, where Gluster brings the storage, and users are able to access files and content either as objects, through Swift’s REST interface, or as regular files, through Gluster’s FUSE or NFS mounts.

    Building Gluster UFO Packages

    Again, I started by building some packages. The Gluster download site offers UFO (aka gluster-swift) packages for enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL and its relabeled children). There’s a source tarball, but unlike the main glusterfs tarball, the gluster-swift tarball doesn’t include a spec file for building rpms. I located spec files for gluster-swift and gluster-swift-plugin at Gluster’s github site, but these spec files referenced a handful of patches that weren’t in the git repository, so I wasn’t able to build them.

    After Googling a while for the missing patches, I found source rpms for gluster-swift and gluster-swift-plugin in a public source repository for Red Hat Storage 2.0. Both of these packages are a hair older than the ones in the Gluster download location: gluster-swfit-1.4.8-3 vs 1.4.8-4 and gluster-swift-plugin-1.0-1 vs. 1.0-2, but I forged ahead with these.

    I had to tweak the SPEC files slightly, changing references to the python2.6 in el6 to the python2.7 that ships with Fedora 17, but I managed to build both of them without much hassle, before copying them over to my openstack test machine and installing them:

    rpmbuild -bb ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/gluster-swift.spec
    rpmbuild -bb ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/gluster-swift-plugin.spec
    scp ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/gluster-swift* root@openstackF17:/root
    ssh root@openstackF17 yum install -y ./gluster-swift-*

    Gluster-Swift + OpenStack

    Over on our openstackF17 machine, the gluster-swift package has placed a bunch of configuration files in /etc/swift. We’re going to leave most of these configurations in place, but we need to make a few modifications, starting with fs.conf:

    vi /etc/swift/fs.conf

    I’m using the four VM gluster cluster described in the OpenStack VM Storage Guide I mentioned above, which is remote from my openstack server, so I have to change “mount_ip” to the ip of one of my gluster servers, and change “remote_cluster” to yes. If my gluster volume, or part of it, was local, I could have left these values alone.

    The other thing required to make the remote gluster cluster bit work is enabling passwordless ssh login between my openstackF17 machine and the gluster server I pointed to in fs.conf:

    ssh-keygen -t rsa
    ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@gluster1

    More config file editing. Next up, proxy-server.conf. In order to get gluster-swift working with OpenStack’s Keystone authentication service, we’re going to grab some of the configuration info from the Fedora 17 OpenStack guide:

    vi /etc/swift/proxy-server.conf

    Change the “pipeline” line under [pipeline:main], adding “authtoken keystone” to the line, and removing “tempauth”:

    pipeline = healthcheck cache authtoken keystone proxy-server

    And then add these sections to correspond with our added elements. As to the “are these needed” comment question, that comes from the howto in the Fedora wiki, and I don’t know the answer, so I left it in:

    [filter:keystone]
paste.filter_factory = keystone.middleware.swift_auth:filter_factory
operator_roles = admin, swiftoperator
[filter:authtoken]
paste.filter_factory = keystone.middleware.auth_token:filter_factory
auth_port = 35357
auth_host = 127.0.0.1
auth_protocol = http
admin_token = ADMINTOKEN
# ??? Are these needed?
service_port = 5000
service_host = 127.0.0.1
service_protocol = http
auth_token = ADMINTOKEN

    If you followed along with the Fedora 17 OpenStack howto, you’ll have a file (keystonerc) in your home directory that sets your OpenStack environment variables. Let’s make sure our variables are set correctly:

    . ~/keystonerc

    Next, we run these commands to replace some placeholder values in our proxy-server.conf file:

    openstack-config --set /etc/swift/proxy-server.conf filter:authtoken admin_token $ADMIN_TOKEN
    openstack-config --set /etc/swift/proxy-server.conf filter:authtoken auth_token $ADMIN_TOKEN

    Now we add the Swift service and endpoint to Keystone:

    SERVICEID=$(keystone service-create --name=swift --type=object-store --description="Swift Service" | grep "id " | cut -d "|" -f 3)
    echo $SERVICEID # just making sure we got a SERVICEID
    keystone endpoint-create --service_id $SERVICEID --publicurl "http://127.0.0.1:8080/v1/AUTH_$(tenant_id)s" --adminurl "http://127.0.0.1:8080/v1/AUTH_$(tenant_id)s" --internalurl "http://127.0.0.1:8080/v1/AUTH_$(tenant_id)s"

    Gluster-swift will be looking for Gluster volumes that correspond to Swift account names. We need to figure out what names we need, and create Gluster volumes with those names. We ask Keystone about our account names:

    keystone tenant-list

    In my setup, this turns up four accounts:

    +----------------------------------+--------------------+---------+
|                id                |        name        | enabled |
+----------------------------------+--------------------+---------+
| 18571133bf9b4236be0ad45f2ccff135 | invisible_to_admin | True    |
| 1918b675fa1f4b7f87c2bb3688f6f2f7 | admin              | True    |
| 42c41f15e6a24fa5b105e89b60af18fb | demo               | True    |
| decd4d68f50345eeb2eae090e2d32dcb | service            | True    |
+----------------------------------+--------------------+---------+

    So far, I’ve needed volumes for the admin and demo accounts. You’ll need to name your Gluster volumes after the value in the “id” column. Following the four node example in the OpenStack VM Storage Guide, the command (which you must run from on of your gluster nodes) will look like this, substituting your own Gluster node IPs, and your volume name values from keystone tenant-list:

    gluster volume create 42c41f15e6a24fa5b105e89b60af18fb replica 2 10.1.1.11:/vmstore 10.1.1.12:/vmstore 10.1.1.13:/vmstore 10.1.1.14:/vmstore

    Run the command again so you have volumes that correspond to both the admin and demo tenant ids.

    Each Gluster volume needs its own mount point. You don’t have to create your mount points manually on each server. And again, the Gluster volume doesn’t have to live on a remote cluster. Any properly named Gluster volume on a server that gluster-swift knows about (from fs.conf, which we modded earlier) and can access passwordlessly (red spell check underline be damned) ought to work.

    All right, almost done. Start or restart memcached, and start gluster-swift:

    service memcached restart
    swift-init main start

    Now, we should be able to test gluster-swift:

    swift list

    If all is well, gluster-swift should try to mount the admin volume (the keystonerc file is telling swift to use the admin account), and satisfying hard drive activity gurgling sounds should ensue. If you run the command “mount” you should see that you have a Gluster volume mounted at the mount point “/mnt/gluster-object/AUTH_YOURADMINVOLNAME”. Like so:

    gluster1:1918b675fa1f4b7f87c2bb3688f6f2f7 on /mnt/gluster-object/AUTH_1918b675fa1f4b7f87c2bb3688f6f2f7 type fuse.glusterfs (rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,max_read=131072)

    You can test uploading to the volume from the command line:

    swift upload container /path/to/file

    You ought to be able to ssh in to one of your gluster nodes, navigate to the mount point that corresponds to your admin account volume, and see the file you just uploaded.

    For a more GUI-ful experience, we can check out our snazzy gluster-swift store from the OpenStack dashboard (you’ll have installed this if you followed the OpenStack Fedora 17 howto). Make sure your firewall is down or you have port 80 open, and restart your web server for good measure:

    service httpd restart

    Visit the dashboard at http://YOUROPENSTACKSERVERIP/dashboard, and log in with admin and (assuming you retained the password default from the howto) verybadpass. In the left nav column, click the “Project” tab. The default project is “demo” (which is why we had to create a demo volume). In the left nav column, under “Object Store,” click “Containers,” and create, delete, upload to, download from, etc. at will. In the background, just as with the “swift list” command, gluster-swift should be reacting to the dashboard’s requests by mounting your Gluster volume.

    UFO in Action

    For Further Study: Glance on Gluster-Swift

    By default, OpenStack’s image-hosting service, Glance, stores its images in a local directory, but it’s possible to use Swift as a back-end for that image storage, by the backend listed in /etc/glance/glance-api.conf from “file” to “swift” and by correctly hooking up the authentication details there. I’ve yet to get this working, though.

    In this OpenStack on Ubuntu howto, the author notes that a glance package from a particular PPA is required to make this work, due to some issue in the latest (as of 5/28/12) glance package from the official repos. I took a peek at the patches included in this substitute package, and couldn’t immediately tell what, if anything, might be missing from Fedora’s glance package.

    If you’re still with me, and you’re interested in setting up all or part of this yourself, don’t hesitate to ask me questions–I puzzled over this for a week or so, and if I can save you some time, that’ll make my toiling more worthwhile to me. Fire away in the comments below, or hit me up on IRC. I’m jbrooks on freenode IRC, and is one of the channels where you can find me.

  • reinstall

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    I reinstalled Fedora 17 on my main work machine yesterday — I was having weird issues with gnome-boxes and virt-manager, and thought my problems might have stemmed from the weird libvirt machinations I undertook to get oVirt running on my laptop w/o disabling NetworkManager.

    I always keep my home directory in a separate partition to allow for easy clean installs w/o losing my data, but this time around I copied my home directory off to a separate drive to start completely fresh — I’ll ferry needed files and folders back as needed.

    One thing I had to go recreate on my new install was a set of tweaks for providing decent font rendering on Fedora. Without these steps, fonts render pretty poorly. I follow the steps in this blog post to mimic Ubuntu’s font rendering options, and then create the .fonts.conf file described here to cajole Google Chrome into obeying the rules laid out in the former step.

    I hereby remind myself to look into exactly why it is that the patent fear fairies that prompt Fedora to ship with a crappy-looking font config don’t equally menace Ubuntu. I realize that my employer, with its relatively deeper pockets, presents a more attractive lawsuit target compared to Ubuntu’s sponsor, but if Fedora were to shun every piece of potentially patent encumbered software, there’d be no Fedora at all.

    Where to draw the line?

  • stuck, volume 1

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    So, I’m working my way through the OpenShift Origin BYO PaaS wiki page, but I’m stuck right now near the finish line.

    On Saturday, I was cranking through the howto, highlighting and middle-click pasting my way to BYOP nirvana, until I hit an authentication issue when it was time to create a domain on my newly-minted PaaS.

    After taking a break for a couple days, I realized that I’d simply forgotten to point my rhc client at the right host — rhc defaults to openshift.redhat.com, and if there’s an account on the Red Hat hosted server with the user name “admin” I can confirm that that user’s password is not “admin” as well.

    Cinch. I’d be up and running in no time. Except I hit another issue — my host complained about: “Permission denied – /var/www/stickshift/broker/Gemfile.lock” and there was no such file on my host. With I bit of help from -dev, I got past the error by running “bundle install” in the broker directory and then chown-ing Gemfile.lock apache:apache.

    But I hit another error message: “Failed to authenticate user ‘stickshift’ on db ‘stickshift_broker_dev’.” Word in -dev is that this is a mongo issue that someone else following the BYO instructions recently encountered as well.

    I’ll circle back to this, but for now I’m going to proceed using the OpenShift Origin image I installed from the LiveCD. I’m copying that image from my notebook, where I’ve been running it on KVM using virt-manager, to my newly-assembled oVirt rig (which I mean to blog about soon) using the handy virt-v2c utility. [dang, stuck there, too]

    More to come…

    [UPDATE 5/20/12]

    Another weekend, another shot at the BYOP. I restored my host back to a “fresh install” snapshot, followed all the directions, and am stuck again at the end of the directions. Getting the error: /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/uplift-bind-plugin-0.8.3/lib/uplift-bind-plugin/uplift/bind_plugin.rb:8: uninitialized constant StickShift::DnsService (NameError).

  • What I Look For In An Open Source Project Web Site

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    Perusing new open source software projects has long been both a job requirement and a pastime for me. Over the past decade plus so I’ve come across a ton of open source project web sites, running the gamut from good to bad — with a healthy contingent of ugly in the mix.

    Of course, it takes more than a sweet web site to make an open source project worth writing about or contributing to — a project that offers up a lousy solution to a real problem, or, worse, seeks to answer an unasked question has more fundamental issues to tackle. On the other hand, you could have a project ideal for scratching, elegantly, some global itch, but if the project does a poor job conveying its whys and hows, it could end up overlooked.

    The basic information I look for in an open source project home page, either right up front or no more than one clearly-labeled link deep, fits (or, at least, can be made to fit) into the classic Five W’s (and an H) model:

    What is the project about / what does it do / what is it for?

    Pretty straightforward. If see a tweet from an open source savvy pal that says something low-context like, “really impressed with what they’ve got going on at $LINK,” and you click, it shouldn’t take long, at all, for you understand what the project is about.

    Initially, I’d left mention of license till the bottom of this post, but for an open source project, that’s another “what” I like to see answered right up top: what’s the license?

    Why should I care / use / contribute?

    What is it and why should I care sort of go together: a first impressions one-two punch. OK, so I see that this project is (say) a command line to do manager. What makes this one better or different than the million other to do apps out there? A well-written “what is it” blurb ought also to answer the “why should I care” query.

    Where do I get it (packages / binaries / source)?

    All right, the project does X and does it in a way that seems sufficiently interesting. Where do I get it? If the project is packaged up for particular operating systems, which ones and where do I find those packages? Where’s the source?

    How do I use it / get involved?

    When I’ve gotten interested enough in a project to learn about what it’s supposed to do and where I can go to get it, I like to take it for a short spin. The most effective projects make it easy for users to get their feet wet by offering up some short getting started instructions.

    Who’s working on the project, and how can I connect w/ them?

    Over the past few years, when I come across a project that seems interesting, but perhaps not yet ready for prime time (or just to be useful to me), I scan the project site for the Twitter feeds or the blogs of the project’s key developers to follow or add to my RSS feed reader. Sometimes these links lead me to other interesting projects, and future tweets or blog posts serve to jog my memory about projects I’ve looked into but didn’t end up digging into in earnest.

    When was the last release, repo activity, project update (proof of life / sell by date)?

    The Internet is littered with the floating husks of dead open source projects, and depending on the web site, one’s slow-moving-but-not-dead project can look exactly like a project that’s gone, never to return. Abandoned projects tend not to be very interesting to me, but that doesn’t stop my friendly neighborhood search engine from suggesting them. When I’m checking out a project, I stay on the lookout for things like commit dates in source repositories, for release dates on binaries, and for mailing list activity. The best projects don’t make me dig for long.

    Those are the basics I look for in an open source project web site, though there are other, specific details I like to see right up front, like the license a project uses. Is it something familiar, like GPL or Apache, or is it some wacky vanity spin of the MPL that requires careful reading before you get an idea of what is and isn’t allowed?

    What do you look for in an open source project web site?

  • Building My Own PaaS with OpenShift Origin

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    I’m working through the OpenShift Origin Build Your Own PaaS howto, which says:

    Several of the cartridge packages have additional third party dependencies. These have not yet been resolved for the open source environment. Work is actively progressing.

    On my Fedora 16 host, these are the cartridges that wouldn’t install for missing dependencies:

    • cartridge-jbossas-7.noarch : Provides JBossAS7 support
    • cartridge-jenkins-1.4.noarch : Provides jenkins-1.4 support

    These are the ones that would install:

    • cartridge-10gen-mms-agent-0.1.noarch : Embedded 10gen MMS agent for performance monitoring of MondoDB
    • cartridge-cron-1.4.noarch : Embedded cron support for express
    • cartridge-diy-0.1.noarch : Provides diy support
    • cartridge-jenkins-client-1.4.noarch : Embedded jenkins client support for express
    • cartridge-mongodb-2.0.noarch : Embedded mongodb support for OpenShift
    • cartridge-mysql-5.1.noarch : Provides embedded mysql support
    • cartridge-nodejs-0.6.noarch : Provides Node-0.6 support
    • cartridge-perl-5.10.noarch : Provides mod_perl support
    • cartridge-php-5.3.noarch : Provides php-5.3 support
    • cartridge-phpmyadmin-3.4.noarch : Embedded phpMyAdmin support for express
    • cartridge-python-3.2.noarch : Provides python-wsgi-3.2 support
    • cartridge-ruby-1.1.noarch : Provides ruby rack support running on Phusion Passenger

    More to come.

  • Run OpenShift Origin from LiveCD, and Make it Stick

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    The OpenShift Origin LiveCD will have you up and running with the code that backs Red Hat’s PaaS in a flash, but installing the LiveCD to your hard drive requires a few workaround steps.

    [UPDATE: Check out wiki-fied, updated version of this howto at the OpenShift Origin community site.]

    Today, Red Hat delivered on its pledge to open the source code and development process behind its Platform as a Service offering, OpenShift. To help avoid confusion between the Red Hat-hosted service and the open source project and code base, the project is named OpenShift Origin.

    The OpenShift Origin source code is available at github.com/openshift, and software packages for Fedora 16 and RHEL 6 are available for download and installation, as well. At this point, though, the fastest way to get and and running with OpenShift Origin is to download this LiveCD image and fire it up on a VM or spare machine.

    The LiveCD will boot you straight into a graphical desktop session, based on Fedora, from which you can create a domain and some sample applications. It couldn’t be much easier to use, but as with most LiveCDs, the environment goes away once you reboot. Also, the LiveCD sets you up to interact with any applications you install through the web browser and terminal window in the LiveCD environment. I prefer to use the browser in my regular desktop environment.

    Fedora LiveCDs come with a nifty “install to hard drive” option, but in order to install the OpenShift Origin LiveCD to a drive (whether physical or virtual) a couple workaround steps are currently required:

    1. Download LiveCD and boot a VM with it. The project wiki includes instructions for setting up a VM with VirtualBox. I used KVM and virt-manager on my Fedora 17 desktop.
    2. In the terminal window that pops up once the LiveCD has finished booting, type “su” to become the superuser.
    3. The OpenShift Origin environment requires that NetworkManager be disabled, but the system installer requires NetworkManager. Enable NetworkManager by adding the line “NM_CONTROLLED=yes” (no quotes) to your network adapter’s config file. Assuming your network adapter is named eth0, this command ought to do the trick: “echo NM_CONTROLLED=yes >> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0”
    4. Restart the network service: “service network restart”
    5. Start the NetworkManager service: “service NetworkManager start”
    6. Start the installer: “liveinst”
    7. Go through text-based install steps, finally rebooting your VM, and logging in as root.
    8. I’m not positive which firewall ports must be open, so for now I’m just disabling the firewall with: “system-configure-firewall-tui”
    9. Run “ifconfig” to figure out the IP address of your VM, and head out to your regular desktop environment to carry out a bit more configuration, and to start using your mini me PaaS installation.
    10. If you’re interested enough in OpenShift to be running OpenShift Origin on one of your own machines, I’m assuming that you’ve already tried out the full-sized, Red Hat-hosted OpenShift service. If so, you’ll want to create a new config file to use with your locally-hosted OpenShift instance, otherwise the rhc client will default to talking to the OpenShift servers off in the clouds.  I created a file called express.conf containing two lines: “default_rhlogin=admin” and “libra_server=YOUR_VM_ADDRESS”.
    11. Next, I created a domain on my OpenShift Origin instance, making sure to append the path to my alternate config file: “rhc domain create -n origin –config=/home/jason/Desktop/express.conf”. When prompted for a password, use “admin”.
    12. Now, you’re ready to install an application. I’m partial to WordPress as a demo app (my blog is powered by WordPress+OpenShift) but if you’d like to try a different app, here’s a big list of easily-deployed quickstarts.
    13. Start following the instructions at the WordPress quickstart, making sure to append your alternate config file like so: 
      rhc app create -a wordpress -t php-5.3 --config=/home/jason/Desktop/express.conf
    14. Your OpenShift Origin will create the new PHP app, and then time out trying to resolve its DNS name. Since we’re interacting with our PaaS from outside of the LiveCD environment, we lose the LiveCD’s automatic DNS magic, and have to make things resolve properly on our own. I made things resolve properly by adding a line to my /etc/hosts file, associating my VM address with the my appname-domainname at the example.com domain to which the LiveCD defaults: 
      192.168.122.147 wordpress-origin.example.com
    15. The DNS time-out message we received in step 14 includes a git clone command for pulling down your skeleton app structure from your PaaS instance. Run it.
    16. We need to give our wordpress app a mysql database to work with. There’s a command for this in the quickstart, to which we’ll again append our alternate config file: 
      rhc app cartridge add -a wordpress -c mysql-5.1 --config=/home/jason/Desktop/express.conf
    17. We’re near the end. Next (and these steps are straight out of the WordPress quickstart) we cd into the app directory, hook up to the wordpress example git repo, pull the code down from there, and then push it up into our OpenShift Origin instance: 
      cd wordpress
git remote add upstream -m master git://github.com/openshift/wordpress-example.git
git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master
git push
    18. If you’re following along with me, you should now have a shiny new WordPress instance available at http://wordpress-origin.example.com, with your default admin user name and password listed in your terminal window following the “git push.”

    So that’s it. You have your very own PaaS instance running on a local VM that won’t go away between reboots.

    The open sourcing of OpenShift is a big deal, but the best PaaS is the one you don’t have to operate yourself. That’s why, as the only current downstream project implementing OpenShift Origin, Red Hat’s OpenShift service remains the best place for people to get acquainted with the project. Here’s hoping that not too much time passes before a bunch of rival implementations hit the scene to give Red Hat a run for its money!

  • more test

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    In general, I prefer Google+ to Twitter. I like posting more than 140 characters, and I like editing my posts if I need/want to (there are other things I like about G+, but this test post is about those first two). I noticed, recently, how people who post wp.me links onto Twitter get their posts, or a portion of their posts, attached to the tweet behind a little photo-style view media link. I’m messing with that right now.

    https://twitter.com/jasonbrooks/status/195676860632416256

    I should say, though, that I’ve been feeling increasingly grumbly about Google+ and its RW API-lessness, and I do like Twitter nonetheless, and, uh, yeah.