Happy 30th Birthday GNU!!

GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!” has turned 30 years. Thanks to Richard Stallman (RMS) for this wonderful initiative along with lot many volunteers . The best part is over 30 years the project has grown to new dimension. We are using it many times in our day to day life without even knowing about it.
Hardly anyone who is using computer has not used GNU powered software. You can see the list of softwares which falls under it here. I am one of the lucky guy who did video interview of RMS in 2009 during his visit to New Delhi but unfortunately the video is not with me anymore. 🙁
The project is base of one of the most successful enterprise like IBM/Red Hat/Google/yahoo. Not only this most of the powerful supercomputers make use of GNU powered free software. I don’t have an example or place where i can/could say Free Software is not used. Even the proprietary operating system like Mac makes use of it.
Last not the least the popular kernel makes use of GNU and together makes GNU/Linux. Some popular softwares which you must have used includes emacs, GIMP, wget, Sed and many more listed here

The project needs your help and you can do the same in many ways listed here
Also you can celebrate 30th GNU birthday in many ways listed here
Please spread the word about it in ways you can by writing blog, organizing the event listed above. The best part of being in community is we can help it grow in many different ways and contributing upstream code is not the only one way. 🙂

Open, (insert whatever here) when it comes to selling technology.

Off late everyone started loving the term OPEN & pushing/re-aligning/re-defining the product around it & it frustrates me. So whenever i hear some legacy hardware vendor or proprietary software vendor mentioning term OPEN i just feel like Mehh…

The real definition of OPEN is

Open Source

Open Design

Open Development

Open Community

Source: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Open

Please don`t build your community this way

I been seeing a new trend which is bad for any community.

Just added few points here

1. Doing senseless Press Release out of anything.

2. Instead of your product talking SHIT about opponents/competitors product

3. Creating fake twitter accounts for bitching [This one got deleted thankfully]

4. Last but not the least by making videos like these which is SAD & shows the poor taste. I am Indian & find it very depressing. [The original one was deleted ]

<Disclaimer: Posting this does not mean or seen as am attacking a particular enterprise, community or its affiliates.>

People(tech) would like to meet before i die

Linus Torvalds

The man who wrote Linux kernel & maintains the overall project. He is also behind a distributed version control and source code management (SCM) system. I know many people hate him because of his response to devs in kernel mailing list. He has his own unique way of addressing issue.

Eric S. Raymond

ESR is wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar and how to become a hacker, which changed my life & got me in the world of free software. I have contributed a chapter about same in open advice title “Life Changer Documentation”.

Steve Wozniak

The guy who invented apple1 & 2.

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim is responsible for this blog/http/www. 🙂

Guido van Rossum

The man behind one of the most popluar programming language python

Jimmy Wales

Better known for wikipedia 🙂

Larry Page & Sergey Brin

For what they did to the web technology one after the other starting with the google search.

Elon Musk

For what he did to e-commerce with PayPal & now with Tesla.

Adrian Cockcroft

Adrian is the guy behind the tech/cloud stuff at Netflix. He is responsible for running one of the biggest service on cloud. We don`t have Netflix yet in India. I often address him as “Cloud Daddy” 🙂

Simone Brunozzi

Well Simon is one of the best guy in business. Anyone who wants to become an evangelist should for sure read his blog its absolutely brilliant. I follow/admire him for the passion & devotion in his work not for whom he works. 🙂

Sean Parker

I am not sure about the tech background of Sean but i admire him for what he has done in such a young age. Also not to forget the guy who got Facebook $$ intially for what it is now. He does everything in style not sure about his marriage ceremony though which created hell lot of controversy.

NOTE: I know i have some friends/people i follow on twitter must be knowing them. It be awesome if they will help me in meeting these folks. Also i will keep adding this list as time progresses or reducing/MET tag incase i meet any of the guys above. HELP ME

UPDATE: In Aug 2016, I got opportunity to join Adrian Cockcroft for lunch.

Happy Birthday OpenStack #OpenStack3Bday

Current Mood (Excited)

What an incredible journey this has been. We are celebrating 3rd birthday of OpenStack, the Open Source cloud computing software for building clouds. We have had awesome journey so far and will continue rocking.

How it started?

Rackspace + NASA = OpenStack

Where are we now? [2]

Rackspace + RedHat + Canonical + IBM + HP + DELL + Cisco + VMware <Insert your company here, i must have missed 150+ others> = OpenStack

OpenStack Vision

To produce the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private cloud providers regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.

Our Definition of “OPEN“

Open Source

Open Design

Open Development

Open Community

How are we doing?

Code

Over 1000 contributors making project super awesome.

Community

Over 10271 from 124 countries are part of this revolution.

User Story

OpenStack is in production over into multiple domain from research/enterprise/telcos many public private cloud providers are selling services on top of it as well.

Me & OpenStack

I have been lucky to see the overall project grow from beginning & contribute to the project whatever way i can. I made many friends in this tenure & got to know many things about cloud/technology.

One More Thing

I see OpenStack giving me freedom to select a particular technology every level of my technology/deployment stack, be it OS/Hypervisor/Network/Storage/DevOps. I see OpenStack as a technology which gives rise to many providers & they take on with commercial vendors. I know every now and then our critics and competitors come up with one or the other theory/analysis/graph/prediction/hypothesis. I am a proud Indian and i believe in what, Mahatma Gandhi father of nation told us

First they ignore you,

then they laugh at you,

then they fight you,

then you win.

How can you help & join us?

Its still not late, you can be part of this project many ways. Please go through the links below to understand & join us.

How To Contribute

How a non developer can contribute to OpenStack

What Next??

I will go eat some cake !!! 😀

vagrant and ubuntu

Vagrant was in my TODO for over one year, its good i finally played with it. I will explain what/how i installed it so whoever wants to play with it can easily deploy & use it. I tested in on ubuntu 10.04 (yeah my old box) but i would/will guarantee it will work on all newer releases. 😀

Things/packages needed to run Vagrant

1. Virtualbox

To install virtualbox simply visit virtualbox official site and follow this install instruction just choose the ubuntu version you are running it. For me i used the repo for lucid & it will be different for you. Also a word of advice kindly install older version of Virtualbox as we have a known issue of NS_ERROR_CALL_FAILED in its latest version. I installed 4.1 in my case.

After successful installation of virtualbox this is how it looks.

     $ VBoxManage --version
       4.1.26r84997

2. Vagrant

I installed vagrant by downloading latest binary from the their website Once i had it installed. It was 3 simple step to get Vagrant up & running.

$ vagrant init precise32 http://files.vagrantup.com/precise32.box
$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh

What this two command does is it gets you the base image which subsequently used for next time bringing up the instance. As you can see it takes precise(12.04) image. Once you have the instance up. You can simply log into the machine via SSH.

~~The Catch~~

By default the instance a bought up with NAT networking mode & you are easily able to access it from your system. In most cases we need Bridge network enabled so the machine/VM can acquire the network IP & additional interface. You need to add the same in the config file of vagrant which is in your home directory.

$ cat Vagrantfile

The old document of vagrant tells you the way how to do it but this will not work in our case. In order to get in working one has to add below mentioned lines inside the “Vagrantfile” as am using my wireless network.

config.vm.network :public_network, :public_network => "wlan0"

After changing this configuration once you will run the commands

$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh

You will be able to see additional interface at “eth1” mapped to the bridge network. You can check other simple vagrant commands as well needed to destroy/suspend

$ vagrant --help
Usage: vagrant [-v] [-h] command []

    -v, --version                    Print the version and exit.
    -h, --help                       Print this help.

Available subcommands:
     box
     destroy
     halt
     init
     package
     plugin
     provision
     reload
     resume
     ssh
     ssh-config
     status
     suspend
     up

For help on any individual command run `vagrant COMMAND -h`

What will i do with Vagrant?

Well am going to use it from now on to test all my custom scripts besides i also need to test Kevins OpenStack cookbook which extensively uses vagrant.

Lastly i can say night well spent credit goes to Kev!! 🙂

Installing it on Ubuntu 12.04

I just got a precise box & deploying Vagrant is very simple, it will bring Virtualbox as well as dependency. 🙂

$ sudo apt-get install vagrant
$ vagrant up
$ Vagrant ssh

Hope it helps.

Linux Namespaces, CentOS & OpenStack

Few weeks back me & my friend wanted to try out OpenStack on CentOS. We followed all steps but after 3 days of debugging we were still not able to figure out the issue. I am total newbie with the networking part of OpenStack, trying to catch up with it.

After hitting head around forums, launchpad & taking help from google we realized it was “Linux Namespaces” which was missing from the CentOS kernel version we were using. It was this configuration inside “l3_agent.ini”

and enabling # use_namespaces = True was our culprit.

Making it “False” and restarting the service made everything work as we desired, which was to run an instance along with associating an IP to the machine & making it reachable.

Further down the line i was having conversation with Lorin on IRC & explained what is Namespaces is & how important it is for SDN/Virtual Networking. I was lucky to go through this and this link to understand this magical piece added inside Linux Kernel.

In newbies term Net Namespaces is like LXC for networking, an independent & isolated network virtualNIC. Which means every instance started will have its own VirtualNIC associated with the greatness of Net Namespaces. Also each net namespace has its own routing table, but also its own iptables chains and rules.

Hope it helps!!

Things i like about Chennai

I been here for over two and half years. So felt like writing what i feel about this place.

Food
Most people think Chennai only famous for veg food like dosa/idli/appam that is not correct. I was lucky to try nice Chettinad non-veg food along with variety of seafood.

Yes thats me eating drumstick chicken & non-veg thali at amma`s

People
I know it must be surprising as what i have heard from most of my friends that people here are not very welcoming to north indians. I was lucky so far & having great time here. Autowalas as ass everywhere & they are no different in Chennai.

Culture
Tamil culture is very old & vast in itself. I enjoyed seeing one or the other festival people celebrate here including the one where they take gods out from temple for a walk/ride.

FOSS
If am correct then linux user group chennai is the only LUG left in our country which is active & holds regular monthly meetups. I have been part of it & presented as well in couple of occasions.

Friends
Last not the least i have made some great friends here who are going to remain part of my entire life no matter where i go.

Planning to Visit Chennai?
Tripadvisor
Chennai Tourism

RabbitMQ webUI & Ubuntu

I heard about RabbitMq webUI from my friend Ritesh. I felt it will be helpful for anyone who wants to understand queue workflow playing with OpenStack. After reading found this for getting the same on Ubuntu 12.04.

Installing RabbitMQ Server

# apt-get install rabbitmq-server

Checking list of installed plugin.

# rabbitmq-plugins list [ ] amqp_client 0.0.0 [ ] cowboy 0.5.0-rmq0.0.0-git4b93c2d [ ] eldap 0.0.0-gite309de4 [ ] mochiweb 2.3.1-rmq0.0.0-gitd541e9a [ ] rabbitmq_auth_backend_ldap 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_auth_mechanism_ssl 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_consistent_hash_exchange 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_federation 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_federation_management 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_jsonrpc 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_jsonrpc_channel 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_jsonrpc_channel_examples 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_management 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_management_agent 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_management_visualiser 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_mochiweb 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_mqtt 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_old_federation 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_shovel 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_shovel_management 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_stomp 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_tracing 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_web_stomp 0.0.0 [ ] rabbitmq_web_stomp_examples 0.0.0 [ ] rfc4627_jsonrpc 0.0.0-git7ab174b [ ] sockjs 0.3.4-rmq0.0.0-git3132eb9 [ ] webmachine 1.9.1-rmq0.0.0-git52e62bc

Enabling the webUI

# rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_management The following plugins have been enabled: mochiweb webmachine rabbitmq_mochiweb amqp_client rabbitmq_management_agent rabbitmq_management Plugin configuration has changed. Restart RabbitMQ for changes to take effect.

root@openstack-lxc:~# service rabbitmq-server restart * Restarting message broker rabbitmq-server [ OK ]

To check the webUI kindly visit the browser with http://localhost:15672 Incase you have not created any user yourself you have a user:password created already guest:guest You should login with the creds & will see a shiny dashboard.

NOTE: If you are using version below

rabbitmq-server     2.7.1-0ubuntu4

Follow this instructions mentioned on stackoverflow

I am thinking about writing next after this so will add more RabbitMQ related blog soon 🙂

Thoughts on/about ITIL

Some of you might not know 3 weeks back i moved to solutions engineering team at my current workplace. One of the main assignment under my belt is to build a product line around emerging cloud technology. I know it sounds to cool isn’t it?

I was suggested by my boss to attend ITIL foundation course as it will help me in understanding whole workflow & process. I was reluctant to spend 24 hours (8*3) i.e 3 days for it initially but after introductory session i got interested.

ITIL just tells/gives you idea & recommendation how things should be designed, kept in place for a successful IT setup. It just tells you the best practice rather instructing how.

So what was my takeaway from the course?

1. Understanding the whole process work flow.
2. Assigning a supervisor/manager who is responsible for one module in the entire process.
3. Roles & responsibility about your product/service.
4. Continuous upgradation & testing to achieve better result.
5. What not to do in order to fail.

Neither am a CEO or some successful manager who/CTO had deployed or architected a massive infrastructure but i would love to recommend everyone about it, its worth reading/understanding.

Lastly i have no interest in taking the certification exam, i just wanted to understand what/how it helps/works & purpose is achieved.