On Feb 15th we migrated the MoinMoin powered OpenStack wiki to a new wiki powered by MediaWiki. Overall the migration went well. There was a large amount of cleanup that needed to get done, but we followed up the migration with a doc cleanup sprint. The wiki should be in a mostly good state. If you happen to find any articles that need cleanup, be bold!

So, what’s new with the wiki?

1. All articles now have discussion pages
2. It’s possible to make PDFs out of individual pages or to create a book (as a PDF or an actual physical book) from collections of articles

The title may make you think there’s an easy way. No such luck. Nova has no facility for extending a flatdhcp network, and as far as I can tell Quantum also has no facility for doing so.

Extending the flatdhcp network can be kind of a pain in the ass, so here’s how I handled it:

Assumptions

• Network before extension:
  • Network CIDR: 10.4.0.0/24
  • Broadcast: 10.4.0.255
  • Netmask: 255.255.255.0
  • Network ID: 2
• Network after extension:
  • Network CIDR: 10.4.0.0/21
  • Broadcast: 10.4.7.255
  • Netmask: 255.255.248.0
  • Network ID: 2

Modify the network

First modify the network via the database:

Voting has started for the OpenStack board and I’m one of the 39 candidates. Many of the candidates have posted answers to a set of questions asked of all candidates. You can read my responses at the candidate site. Rather than reiterating those answers, I’d like to bring up some of the specific things I’d like to do as a board member.

Fight for the users

Being an OpenStack user is difficult, currently. Unless you have an OpenStack developer on your team, it’s difficult to even run OpenStack, let alone migrate between versions. Many deployments will run into bugs in the stable version of OpenStack and getting those bugs fixed and moved into the stable branch is difficult.

I’m actually on time for this update, this year! Here’s my goals from last year; I’ll give feedback inline:

1. Continue with the Labs project. Finish set up of test/dev Labs, and begin work and make major progress on tool Labs.
   • Partial success: Test/dev Labs is going really well. At the time of this writing we have 99 projects, 174 instances, and 446 users. We have per-project nagios, ganglia, puppet, and sudo. We also have an all-in-one MediaWiki puppet configuration. We currently have one zone with 5 compute nodes, and will mostly triple the capacity of that in the next month. We have another zone coming up in another datacenter that will be 8 large compute nodes. Stability is still currently a concern, and we haven’t come out of closed beta, yet, though. Also, work on Tool Labs is mostly not started. We do have a bots cluster that’s community managed, but we don’t have database replication and don’t have a simple way for tool authors to contribute.

I’ve just released OATHAuth 0.1 for MediaWiki. This is an HMAC based One Time Password (HOTP) implementation providing two factor authentication. This is the same technology used for Google’s two-factor authentication.

OATHAuth is an opt-in feature that adds more security accounts in a wiki. It provides two-factor authentication, using your phone as the something you have, and your username/password as the something you know. If you are using iPhone or Android, you can use the Google Authenticator app as a client. There are also clients for most other phones and desktops; Wikipedia has a good list of clients.

In Wikimedia Labs, we don’t manage authentication and authorization in the normal public cloud way. We don’t assume that an instance creator is managing auth for instances they create. Instead, all of Labs uses a single auth system for all projects and instances and a community manages project membership and auth.

In the original design, being a project member in specific projects would automatically give you root via sudo and being a project member in a global project would give you shell, but not root. We were handling this through puppet configuration. This was a fairly limiting system. Giving fine grained permissions wasn’t easy. The instances knew which users were a member of a project since the projects were also posix groups; however, they didn’t know which users were in the roles of that project, so there was no fined grained way to handle this.

The OpenStackManager extension is a web interface for OpenStack, and a manager for a fully integrated test and development network being written primarily for Wikimedia Foundation use.

This release is mostly aimed at performance and usability. Here’s a list of changes:

• Added a project filter. Rather than showing all projects, only projects selected in the project filter will show in the management interfaces. This should make the interfaces contain far less text, and should make interfaces load much faster.

I had a situation recently where a number of live migrations failed in a truly nasty way. The live migration failed part way through, but didn’t properly back-out the changes. This left the instance running nowhere, but in a “migrate” state in the database. I tried to reboot the instance, which then left the instance in the “running” state.

Of course, the instance wasn’t actually running anywhere and the reboot command wouldn’t start the instance, because it thought it was running. The logs complained that the instance wasn’t running whether I tried to restart the migration, or reboot. What a full of fail situation.

The OpenStackManager extension is a web interface for OpenStack, and a manager for a fully integrated test and development network being written primarily for Wikimedia Foundation use.

I’ve been busy enough lately working on our OpenStack infrastructure that I haven’t made an OpenStackManager release in a while. Over the past seven months I’ve continued to make small changes to the software, and the past few weeks I’ve added features I feel deserve another release.

This is a bugfix and features release. Major changes include compatibility for cactus and diablo releases of nova, and 1.18 compatibility for MediaWiki. The changes in this release focused mainly on making workflow easier. Here’s a complete list of changes:

For the proper automation of a service using puppet, it’s necessary to ensure the service can be installed repeatedly, and that the service is fully up and ready when it is built. To ensure this, I’m using the following process, using nova:

1. Create an instance and use it to do experimentation with the service.
2. Document the service, along with the installation process on wikitech, after ensuring the service is working properly.
3. Create a second instance. Following the documentation written, puppetize the service.
4. Create a third instance. Ensure the puppetized service runs properly when initialized from scratch.