Today I wandered into a bit of a rat hole discovering how to export data from OpenStack Cinder volumes when you don’t have admin permissions, and I thought it was worth documenting here so I remember it for next time. Let’s assume that you have a Cinder volume named “child1”, which is a 64gb volume…
Author: mikal
The Calculating Stars
Winner of both a Hugo, Locus and a Nebula, this book is about a mathematical prodigy battling her way into a career as an astronaut in a post-apolocalyptic 1950s America. Along the way she has to take on the embedded sexism of America in the 50s, as well as her own mild racism. Worse, she…
Configuring load balancing and location headers on Google Cloud
I have a need at the moment to know where my users are in the world. This helps me to identify what compute resources to serve their request with in order to reduce the latency they experience. So how do you do that thing with Google Cloud? The first step is to setup a series…
Interviewing hints (or, so you’ve been laid off…)
This post is an attempt to collect a set of general hints and tips for resumes and interviews. It is not concrete truth though, like all things this process is subjective and will differ from place to place. It originally started as a Google doc shared around a previous workplace during some layoffs, but it…
Writing a terraform remote state server
Terraform is a useful tool for deploying cloud resources. This post isn’t an introduction to terraform, so I’ll assume you already know and love it. If you want more, then this getting started guide would be a sensible start. At its most basic level, terraform deploys cloud resources and stores information about those resources in…
Setting up VXLAN between nested virt VMs on Google Compute Engine
I wanted to play with a VXLAN mesh between VMs on more than one hypervisor node, but the setup for VXLAN ended up being a separate post because it was a bit long. Read that post first if you want to follow the instructions here. Now that we have a working VXLAN mesh between our…
Setting up VXLAN on Google Compute Engine
So my ultimate goal here is to try out VXLAN between some VMs on instances in Google compute engine, but today I’m just going to get VXLAN working because that took a fair bit longer than I expected. First off, boot your instances — because I will need nested virt later I chose two instances…
Playing with the python prometheus query API
The last few days have been a bit icky around here, with my house apparently proudly residing in the major city with the dirtiest air in the world. So, I needed a distraction… It has also been quite hot, so I wondered how my energy usage was going. I have prometheus monitoring of my power…
Coming to grips with Kubernetes in 2020: online training
There are a few online training resources I’ve had a play with while learning Kubernetes, so I figure that’s worth a quick write up. This is a follow on from my post about Kubernetes podcasts I’ve tried. I’ve tried three training providers so far: The Linux Foundation Kubernetes course (LFS258 Kubernetes Fundamentals) is probably the…
Hacking on Arlec Christmas lights with tasmota
I’m loving the wide array of electrically certified home automation devices we’re seeing now. Light bulbs, sensors, power boards, and even Christmas lights. Specifically Arlec is shipping these app controllable Christmas lights this year, which looked very much like they should work with Tasmota. (Sorry for the terrible product picture, I can’t find this product…