AMI

English: Cloud Computing (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Modern cloud computing doesn’t install the same way that “bare-metal” and traditional virtualisation system use. As I have discussed before, they may not even be using a boot loader. This has a dramatic effect on the way cloud servers (aka. instances) are booted.

chef-solo

Full Size Chef Puppet

The Chef hello world equivalency  is not as straight forward as a shell redirection that is Puppet. But after teaching @crizzXe how to deploy an appliance that I’ve been working on I now have a good way to convey what’s going on.

Telephones

An incoming call…

Base

OpenStack (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I think I’ve done it. I now have my own home IaaS.

I went for the OpenStack approach, Packstack with RDO on Scientific Linux. In the future I want to replace SL6 with Gentoo on the bare metal, and install the OpenStack packages from portage, but I’ll wait for the work from a Gentoo dev who knows what he’s doing.

This also means that the running hypervisor is KVM, not the Xen that I would rather be using. Technically, there isn’t much difference to them, but Xen is the hypervisor used by AWS, PV images can be booted without fiddling with partitioning and bootloaders. That’s so ’90s.

Core

Bios (Photo credit: Henrique Vicente)

 

I’m a big fan of the stage3 install method.

 

Prepare partitions, format filesystems and make a mount point. Extract a root filesystem into place. Add a kernel and boot loader, reboot and done. The rest is configuration.

 

Gentoo FTW!

These past few weeks, there have been some pretty disturbing disruptions for Linux users on rolling release distros.The biggest upset in recent times I’ll describe as “The udev-200 issue”, where the symptoms of an unsupervised update/reboot cycle will present you with a) a system that won’t boot, b) a system without network or c) both.

filesystems

Raspberry Pi and Chromebook Pixel

I haven’t had a commercially backed Linux device that I’ve been excited to use as much as my Pixel.

One of the things that brightened my day today was the realisation that Chromebooks support Linux filesystems for SDCards and other removable media.

This opens up a lot of Pi hackery possibilities.

Encrypted

#!/bin/bash

echo -n "Passphrase:"
read -sr p
gpg -d --batch --passphrase "$p" "$0" | python

exit $?
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux)

jA0EAwMClL8rFOkU2Nm0yTK6hn6pQXkvOV1Q6Zn4fSrdAA4hrsOfYKkN5YMsJEIS
khru8d9rbGU1nLVnso1VhGJWpg==
=9G1r
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----

Maybe I should combine this with puppet.

mem=3728M

Apparently, the default SeaBIOS on the Chromebook Pixel only exposes 1M of RAM.

To boot a kernel and initramfs, you need a bit more than that. Here’s how I calculated how many megabytes the on board Intel graphics card removes from the main pool of RAM.

Pixel Photo

Yea, I’m one of those people now.