I wanted a quick summary of OpenStack git release tags for a talk I am working on, and it turned out to be way more complicated than I expected. I ended up having to compile a table, and then turn that into a code snippet. In case its useful to anyone else, here it is:…
Rejected talk proposal: Shaken Fist, thought experiments in simpler IaaS clouds
This proposal was submitted for FOSDEM 2021. Given that acceptances were meant to be sent out on 25 December and its basically a week later I think we can assume that its been rejected. I’ve recently been writing up my rejected proposals, partially because I’ve put in the effort to write them and they might…
pngtools, code that can nearly drink in the US
I was recently contacted about availability problems with the code for pngtools. Frankly, I’m mildly surprised anyone still uses this code, but I am happy for them to do so. I have resurrected the code, placed it on github, and included the note below on all relevant posts: A historical note from November 2020: this…
Shaken Fist 0.2.0
The other day we released Shaken Fist version 0.2, and I never got around to announcing it here. In fact, we’ve done a minor release since then and have another minor release in the wings ready to go out in the next day or so. So what’s changed in Shaken Fist between version 0.1 and…
The KSM and I
I spent much of yesterday playing with KSM (Kernel Shared Memory, or Kernel Samepage Merging depending on which universe you come from). Unix kernels store memory in “pages” which are moved in and out of memory as a single block. On most Linux architectures pages are 4,096 bytes long. KSM is a Linux Kernel feature…
Introducing Shaken Fist
The first public commit to what would become OpenStack Nova was made ten years ago today — at Thu May 27 23:05:26 2010 PDT to be exact. So first off, happy tenth birthday to Nova! A lot has happened in that time — OpenStack has gone from being two separate Open Source projects to a…
A totally cheating sour dough starter
This is the third in a series of posts documenting my adventures in making bread during the COVID-19 shutdown. I’d like to imagine I was running science experiments in making bread on my kids, but really all I was trying to do was eat some toast. I’m not sure what it was like in other…
A super simple non-breadmaker loaf
This is the second in a series of posts documenting my adventures in making bread during the COVID-19 shutdown. Yes I know all the cool kids made bread for themselves during the shutdown, but I did it too! So here we were, in the middle of a pandemic which closed bakeries and cancelled almost all…
A breadmaker loaf my kids will actually eat
My dad asked me to document some of my baking experiments from the recent natural disasters, which I wanted to do anyway so that I could remember the recipes. Its taken me a while to get around to though, because animated GIFs on reddit are a terrible medium for recipe storage, and because I’ve been…
Exporting volumes from Cinder and re-creating COW layers
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…