Leif Madsen. on Leif Madsen.

Blog License

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 08:40:26 -0500

Blog by Leif Madsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://github.com/leifmadsen/blog.

AWX: The Poor Man's CI?

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 13:48:19 -0500

I’m just going to go ahead and blame @dougbtv for all my awesome and terrible ideas. We’ve been working on several Ansible playbooks to spin up development environments; like kucean.

Due to the rapid development nature of things like Kubernetes, Heketi, GlusterFS, and other tools, it’s both possible and probable that our playbooks could become broken at any given time. We’ve been wanting to get some continous integration spun up to test this with Zuul v3 but the learning curve for that is a bit more than we’d prefer to tackle for some simple periodic runs. Same goes for Jenkins or any other number of continous integration software bits.

Enter the brilliantly mad mind of @dougbtv. He wondered if AWX (Ansible Tower) could be turned into a sort of “Poor Man’s CI”? Hold my beer. Challenge accepted!

Deploying AWX to OpenStack RDO Cloud

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 10:20:24 -0500

Recently I’ve been playing around with AWX (the upstream, open source code base of Ansible Tower), and wanted to make it easy to deploy. Standing on the shoulders of giants (namely @geerlingguy) I built out a wrapper playbook that would let me easily deploy AWX into a VM on an OpenStack cloud (in my case, the RDO Cloud). In this blog post, I’ll show you the wrapper playbook I built, and how to consume it to deploy a development AWX environment.

Persistent volumes with GlusterFS

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 13:28:56 -0400

It’s been a while since I had the original vision of how storage might work with Kubernetes. I had seen a project called Heketi that helped to make GlusterFS live inside the Kubernetes infrastructure itself. I wasn’t entirely convinced on this approach because I wasn’t necessarily comfortable with Kubernetes managing its own storage infrastructure. This is the story about how wrong I was.

yakLab Part 1c: Bootstrapping Bifrost with Ansible

Fri, 04 Aug 2017 15:02:00 -0400

In this scene I’ll explore some of the bootstrapping I’ve been working on for a while that will result in a clean, shiny new Bifrost deployment, populated with inventory, executed from your laptop to a virtual machine.

Bifrost is an OpenStack project that utilizes OpenStack Ironic to provision baremetal nodes. This is related to my previous post on Building the virtual Cobbler deployment.

yakLab Part 1b: Kickstart File Build Out

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 13:54:42 -0400

In scene 1b, we’ll continue with our work from the Building the virtual Cobbler deployment and get a kickstart file loaded into Cobbler. I’m going to be mostly reviewing the kickstart file itself, and not really getting into how to manage the Cobbler process itself (that’s left as an exercise for the reader).

yakLab Part 1a: Building the virtual Cobbler deployment

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 20:45:01 -0400

In this scene I’ll discuss how I’ve built out a local Cobbler deployment into my virtual host in order to bootstrap the operating system onto my baremetal nodes via kickstart files and PXE booting.

yakLab build out

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 15:00:00 -0400

Edit 2017-08-09: Updated diagram 1-1 to a graphic showing the entire lab physical topology

The yakLab is a place where yaks are electronically instantiated for the purpose of learning and documenting. The lab consists of a virtualization host (virthost) which has 64GB of memory and hosts all the virtual machines, primarily for infrastructure.

Finding available Ansible tags in playbooks and roles

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 15:42:23 -0500

Today I went down a yak shaving path trying to figure out how to get all the available tags in a fairly complicated plethora of Ansible playbooks and roles. One of these such situations involves TripleO Quickstart, which is made up of several different playbooks and repositories of different roles.

Installing Python 2.7 on CentOS 6.x

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 14:34:38 -0500

I recently had a need to install Python 2.7 on an older CentOS 6 machine since I wanted to generate some SSL certificates for my web server. On CentOS 6, then default Python installation is 2.6, which doesn’t seem to work for Let’s Encrypt.

Create a virtual undercloud with TripleO Quickstart

Wed, 28 Dec 2016 13:01:21 -0500

In this blog post I’ll discuss how I’m currently using TripleO Quickstart to instantiate a virtual machine on a remote virtual machine host from my workstation. In follow up blog posts I’ll discuss how to utilize the virtual machine to provision both virtual and baremetal overclouds from the virtual machine.

Creating virtual machines in libvirt with virt-install

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 14:36:23 -0500

I’ve been wanting to automate my virtual machine instantiation for a while now, but I’ve always hated the idea of having to spin up multiple bits of infrastruction to deal with PXE booting, web server to host a kickstart file, etc. Luckily, I ran into some stuff today, and figured out how to automate virtual machine instantitation without having to resort to anything outside of localhost.

Initial Fedora libvirt Setup

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 10:30:35 -0500

There are always a few things I need to do to get libvirt working with a non-root user on Fedora that I need to do, and typically results in some Google researching. Here are some notes of what I recently did to get my libvirt setup going on a new Fedora 25 installation and working with a non-root user.

Create network bridge with nmcli for libvirt

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 14:51:52 -0500

In order to get libvirt working properly with bridged networking, we first need to configure our local network to have network bridge slaved to our wired ethernet adapter. I don’t have to set this up too often (as once I do, it just sits there running happily). Here are some basic steps I did to get this going locally.

TripleO: Using the fake_pxe driver with Ironic

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 17:00:00 -0500

I’ve been working on testing things with TripleO and normally I use TripleO Quickstart to spin things up in a virtual environment.

Often when doing NFV work though, you need things that can’t be used in a virtual environment (such as DPDK, SR-IOV, etc) so you need some baremetal nodes.

In my home lab environment though, I don’t have the luxury of IPMI, so I need to make use of the fake_pxe driver in Ironic, which allows for standard PXE control, but requires you to deal with powering on and off the machines manually. Let me show you how I make use of that.