Clouds, Networking and Technology

My devstack installation was failing with an error reported by the GnuTLS module as shown below: $ git clone https://github.com/openstack/horizon.git /opt/stack/horizon --branch master Cloning into '/opt/stack/horizon'... remote: Counting objects: 154213, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (11/11), done. error: RPC failed; curl 56 GnuTLS recv error (-9): A TLS packet with unexpected length was received. fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly fatal: early EOF fatal: index-pack failed The following Git config changes fixed the issue for me. Am hoping it will be useful for someone out there: $ git config http.sslVerify false $ git config --global http.postBuffer 1048576000

When a Cirros VM is launched in Openstack Newton using the latest branch code you may encounter an error which prevents you from logging into VM's console. As soon as you start typing the username 'cirros' you may find the following error message getting printed on the console: atkbd serio0: Unknown key released (translates Set 2, ................) atkbd serio0: Use 'setkeycodes 00 ' to make it known This is a known issue and is tracked @ https://bugs.launchpad.net/devstack/+bug/1619554 I had tough time finding a solution to this problem and the solution turns out to be quite a simple one. This issue is occurring due to a bug in the latest noVNC code and is tracked @ https://bugs.launchpad.net/horizon/+bug/1622684 This problem can be solved in two ways (as a workaround): 1. Set NOVNC_BRANCH=v0.6.0 in your local.conf file and restack 2. cd /opt/stack/noVNC     git checkout v0.6.0     Now go to your VM console and refresh it. It should start wo...

I have a Windows 10 laptop (host) which uses Virtualbox as the hypervisor. In the Virtualbox, I have a Ubuntu 16.10 VM. Once in a while its required to copy text between the VM and the host and Virtualbox has a feature to enable bi-directional shared clipboard: This feature does not work sometimes. After going through some discussion forums I came across the below suggestion which solved this problem. Run the following commands on the VM: sudo VBoxClient-all stop sudo VBoxClient-all start    

I had been a hard core Java programmer through out my career and had moved onto Python a while ago. The transition to python was a roller coaster ride of moments of unbridled exultation, deja vu and mirth followed by those of horror, surprise and deep disgust. Just to crib a bit, Python does not provide encapsulation...arrrghhhhh!!! and the best way to prevent people from calling an internal method seems to be to request them not to do so. """      This method is meant to be consumed locally.      Don't call it from outside.... please please please :( """ def _do_something_internal():     -----------------     ----------------- This blog (and a few subsequent ones, hopefully) will capture my observations on some gotchas that "pleasantly" surprise people coming from the Java domain (may be relevant to other languages as well). Variable Scoping Scenario 1 : def method1():     try: ...

I have written a tech wiki article on how to install Juniper's OpenStack FWaaS Plugin @ http://forums.juniper.net/t5/Data-Center/How-to-set-up-OpenStack-firewall-as-a-service-plugin-for-SRX-and/ta-p/282050 This article covers the configuration that needs to be done on the OpenStack side as well as the configuration that needs to be done for the plugin. A reference topology is used and the whole configuration is done as a walk through using the reference model.

Juniper has come out with their latest version of VSRX 2.0 (formerly called as Firefly or VSRX 1.0). This release supports a broader set of features and is more performant than the earlier version. More details about the product can be obtained here I had recently tried out instantiating VSRX 2.0 on Virtualbox. The process required a few minor tweaks and this blog will cover them. Prerequisites Download VSRX KVM Applicance from Juniper Website (You need to take care of the legal formalities) Virtualbox 4.3 and above Download qemu-img converter for Windows  The image provided by Juniper is in QCOW2 format. In order to use it in Virtual box you need to convert it to VDI format. To do this you can use the tool qemu-img converter as follows: #qemu-img.exe convert media-srx-ffp-vsrx-vmdisk-15.1X49-D15.4.qcow2 -O vdi vsrx2.0-1.vdi The conversion will take a few seconds and you should have the VDI created in the directory. At this piont, you can proceed to create a VM by f...

Scrapy in the words of its creators: "Scrapy is an application framework for crawling web sites and extracting structured data which can be used for a wide range of useful applications, like data mining, information processing or historical archival."  A screenshot grabbed from the site shows how concise the working code can be: Scrapy works only with Python 2.7. The objective of this blog is to get you started with Scrapy and provide you with enough information to carry further on your own. In this blog, I will setup a scrapy project and retrieve some data off my blog site. Pre-requsites Python 2.7 pip and setuptools Python packages. lxml . Most Linux distributions ships prepackaged versions of lxml. Otherwise refer to http://lxml.de/installation.html OpenSSL . This comes preinstalled in all operating systems, except Windows where the Python installer ships it bundled. Setup pip install scrapy Create a Project scrapy startproject blog This comman...