Three Drunken SysAds

I’ve started to make some changes to the Cobbler tree to enable it to run on other linux distros than the RedHat family.

First up, Ubuntu Lucid!

Install the required packages:

aptitude install python-yaml python-cheetah python-netaddr python-urlgrabber

Get the source code from my git tree:

git clone git://github.com/proffalken/cobbler.git

change to the new directory and run the setup as root:

cd cobbler
python setup.py install

and there we are, Cobbler should now be running on your server!

There are some discrepancies and it’s not working 100% yet but it will install and run.

I’ll post some more information on getting the web interface up and running in the coming hours/days/weeks as I find the time! :)

I’ve noticed that some people have shown an interest in my cucumber-vhost project.

I’ve just made a few commits that now mean you have steps to tear down virtual servers as well as create them and, as a result, I’m calling this version 0.1 and releasing it for general usage.

There are still a few caveats – I’ve not tested it with any backend systems for libvirt other than kvm/qemu and I’ve not written the steps to confirm a server is up/responding to a give port – but it works and I have it successfully building and destroying VMs under Hudson using the rake plugin.

Please file all bugs on the github bug tracker so I can try and fix them.

(Special thanks go to clalance in #virt on irc.oftc.net for help with sorting out the storage stuff!)

I’m heading towards being able to create a Continuous Integration system for setting up and testing my config files.

This post consists of a few notes I’ve observed as I’ve been configuring KVM, Cobbler, Koan and Puppet in order to achieve this.

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Remmina rocks. One window with tabs for all your RDP, VNC, SSH and NX connections is awesome!

Here are some (very) brief instructions on getting it installed on Ubuntu Lucid: continue reading…

One of the small issues that I’ve run into when deploying ActiveMQ/Mcollective is that there isn’t currently a repository for these packages.

If I get the resources, then I’ll try and set up a repository for both of these packages and their dependencies so that it’s easier to install, however for the time being you can create a local repo as follows:

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I’ve finally got around to creating a github repo and I’ll be checking all my puppet modules into this from now on.

The repo is: http://github.com/proffalken/proffalkensPuppetModules

There’s only a README there at the moment, but expect code to follow soon!

I’ve been playing with Puppet for some time now and creating the directory structure for modules as defined in the puppet best practice guide gets tedious after a while, so I threw together a simply base script that takes a single argument and builds the directory structure for you.

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OK, so I might have been a bit hasty to dismiss Centos in my last post – a couple of people have contacted me and told me about additional repos that I can use for rubygems etc – so as a brief interlude, here’s the instructions for getting MCollective and ActiveMQ up and running on Centos 5:

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A few weeks ago I was at UKUUG and met an intriguing project (and it’s owner) called mcollective.

MCollective is a system that enables you to run queries across multiple servers in real time and have the responses come back to you in a speed you would only expect if you were physically at the console.  In other words:- it’s f**king quick!

This post sets out to show you how to install it on Ubuntu Server (the instructions should apply to both 9.10 and 10.04 RC), the next set in the series will help you get it up and running across multiple machines!

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There are a few dependencies that need to be installed before cucumber-nagios will work correctly:

1. Install RubyGems from source.  Trust me, you’ll thank me for this later
2. install ruby, irb, rdoc and ruby-dev from Apt using your favourite package manager
3. install libxslt-dev, libxslt-ruby and libopenssl-ruby from Apt
4. install cucumber-nagios using GEM

And that’s about it…