The basics of defining what modules get applied to a particular node is really simple in Puppet. Out of the box you just use the hostname and the FQDN and everyone is happy. You find this everywhere in documentation, blog posts, presentations, etc. However is has a problem: scale.

What if you have an elastic infrastructure with nodes being created and destroyed automatically? What if you want to use the same manifests in different environment, but use different hostnames? What if you have stupidly complex host naming conventions that you cannot get your head round (current day job problem for me :-( )?

Recently I have been working a lot on a backup solution at work, which has been a painful experience to say the least. Why? Simply because there is no solution that meets my ideal requirements. These are pretty precise:

• Open Source
• Openstack Swift as a backend
• File level restores
• Scalable
• Lightweight
• An idiot must be able to restore a file
• Not a source of truth about my infrastructure
• Automated restore testing

A nice bonus would be volume level backups of Openstack Cinder.

It’s a process that strikes fear into the hearts of Sysadmins everywhere. This weekend I finally got round to upgrading the Openstack cluster in my lab to Kilo. As I have no spare machines lying around (Intel NUC/HP Microserver/similar donations welcome) I did it in place.

Did it go well? Mostly...

My base was a Juno install from Packstack. If your Juno install was different, then YMMV, but the idea should transfer. The basic process was to install the Kilo yum repo, then run an upgrade:

I am a fan of Gitlab. While Github is great, and I use it heavily, one should never be 100% reliant on the whims of a for-profit company. After all, their agenda is not the same as mine and could chang in the future. I also use it for projects at work where we do not necessarily want to allow public access.

Sending emails however is a little complicated. A good email server needs DNS and and SMTP properly configured. You then spend all your waking hours ensuring that you are not on any blacklists. Once you have done that you may even have to time to do the rest of your job.

I recently got myself a new saddle. The one that came with my Felt F95 was starting to rattle on its rails which was driving me, and my riding buddies, insane. We are all engineers, so OCD is a shared problem we have.

Anyway, while scanning through my favourite non-local bike shop I came across the Selle Italia Q-Bik Flow, for only €15. Buying something as personal as a saddle online is always a risk, but I figured that at the price it was not that much of a risk. I promptly bought it (along with some new brakes and handlebar tape - reviews to come), it arrived on Tuesday and I put it all on that evening.

I'm back playing with Openstack again. The day job once again Openstack based, and as of last week my lab is all Openstack too. While oVirt is awesome, I felt like a change.

Anyway, the meat of today's problem comes from the day job. I have some instances deployed via heat that have multiple Cinder volumes attached to them, these then need to be mounted in a certain way. The syntax for attaching a cinder volume to an instance is:

Installing a Puppetmaster is a bit of a chicken-egg problem. We want to have our environment as automated and slick as possible, but we currently have no tools installed to to so.

So what do we actually need to install and configure for our Puppet master:

• Puppet
• Hiera
• R10k
• Git

This is the minimum, from this it can go ahead and dogfood itself in my prefered fashion.

As promised in the previous post, I thought I would share my Sensu/Puppet config. This is based on the Puppet infrastucture I decribed here so everything goes into Hiera.

For reasons best known to me (or my DHCP server) my Sensu host is on 192.168.1.108.

First your Puppetfile tells R10k to install the Sensu module, plus a few more:

mod 'nanliu/staging'
mod 'puppetlabs/rabbitmq'
mod 'sensu/sensu'

mod 'redis',
:git => 'https://github.com/chriscowley/chriscowley-redis.git',
:commit => '208c01aaf2435839ada26d3f7187ca80517fa2a8

    read more