Again we move forward the ratchet of mediocrity

I don’t care what a suit says, I’m not consuming low effort nonsense

I’ve been putting off writing anything here for since April. Not because I don’t have anything to say, but I’ve been seriously lacking motivation to do much more than go to work, go to the gym and sleep.

I’ve always had a bit of a seasonal depression, though for the most part I’ve been able to manage it with proper diet and exercise. This year, however, it’s just hit me hard and I’ve not really wanted to do anything productive.

As I’ve mentioned a few times in the past, I’m quite an avid Linux user and have been for a long time. All my rack machines run Ubuntu Jammy, and I’ve been running Arch on my laptop ever since I got it.

However, I haven’t used Linux on my desktop machine since about 2 years ago when my budget SSDs shat themselves. I quickly bought a 4TB Samsung NVME replacement and decided to go the Windows route because of games and music software. I’ve been using Windows 10 since then, and I think it affected me in odd ways.

I recently slapped a new box in my rack and installed some general purpose services on it, one of which was Gitea, which is a self hosted git service.

One of my ongoing efforts is to move as much as possible off the cloud and into my rack. While this is not necessarily the most economical decision, I have the peace of mind that I’m keeping my data in my own space rather than shipping it off to a third party. It also has the added benefit of not needing to wait until Amazon gets their shit together and updates the node build images.

Thought I’d post a stream of consciousness type post on my year, might help me piece together some disparate thoughts.

Others posting

I’ve seen a lot of negativity from others this year. I get that things are tough, but there seems to be an active push against acknowledging the great things in your life. I’ve personally taken to being more positive about things, even if I do crack dark jokes at times.

So today I learned that by default GCP service accounts can’t impersonate themselves. I was trying to run a Github action at work, and one of the things in the script was a call to the credentials service to generate the correct token. I passed the bound github runner service account as the account to impersonate, and got back a 403 error. I ended up forking the action and just pulling it into our repo to short circuit the impersonation function.

I’ve been a Linux enthusiast since I first started uni. I still have my first Kubuntu CD somewhere, and while I mostly work off the Macbook work has supplied me now, my own personal Thinkpad is running Arch.

However, one thing I never bothered diving into too deeply was systemd. This came back to bite me a bit with my openstack install, as Zun containers were hanging on boot.

This led me down the rabbit hole, and I’ve spent about 3 weeks trying to figure it out. Originally, I thought it was a Zun problem, since it just looked like it was never starting the container. After trawling through logs, I eventually tracked it down to the time when Kuryr was trying to attach the interfaces to the bridge.

So I’ve spent a bit of time with OpenStack now, debugging issues and getting my setup tuned and ready to go.

For the most part, Neutron and Nova work great. No complaints. Haven’t used much of Keystone directly but I’m sure it works fine. Bit of configuration and debugging to do on Magnum (I think), but again I’m pretty sure it’s a “I configured this incorrectly” problem and not a “this is a piece of shit” problem.

I recently found a 50% off deal on rack servers at Lenovo, and picked one up for a pretty good price. It’s 100% overkill, but I’ve always wanted my own server just because.

Since it’s complete overkill, I decided I needed to keep that train rolling and set it up as an Openstack all in one.

The Strategy

In the lead up to the server’s delivery, I looked into the different ways to set up the cloud. The first stop was microstack, which is a Canonical supported effort. Configuration was trivial, and I was able to quickly get it up and running in an Ubuntu server VM. After exploring a little bit, I decided that I wanted to experiment with Trove, Swift and Magnum, which aren’t offered in the package.