Here are some tricks I use to make my vagrant boxes as small as possible:

Tips: Booting in single user mode:

I boot in single user mode since it will prevent running services that could output logs. I do this because I zero out all my logs before packaging the box.

Updating:

After updating any package, run yum clean (or the apt equivalent).

When booted in single user mode, don’t forget to start-up your network before updating.

When updating kernels, install the kernel packages, reboot and remove the old kernel packages that are no longer in use. Remember to re-install the VirtualBox add-ons too after a kernel update.

Cleanup:

After doing whatever you need to do with the box, I do some rather nasty stuff to make sure the box uses as little as possible place. If you are using a RAW hard-disks, these might be a bad idea (stuff gets BIG).

• Zero out all remaining unused disk space
• Zero out the swap
• Clear out all log files (I just make them empty, I do NOT delete them)

Script:

(You can find this script – or an older version in /root/tools/cleanup_diskspace.sh on my newer vagrant boxes.)

cat - << EOWARNING WARNING: This script will fill up your left over disk space.   DO NOT RUN THIS WHEN YOUR VIRTUAL HD IS RAW!!!!!   You should NOT do this on a running system. This is purely for making vagrant boxes damn small.   Press Ctrl+C within the next 10 seconds if you want to abort!!   EOWARNING sleep 10;   echo 'Cleanup log files'; find /var/log -type f | while read f; do echo -ne '' &gt; $f; done;   echo 'Whiteout root'; count=`df --sync -kP / | tail -n1 | awk -F ' ' '{print $4}'`; dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/whitespace bs=1024 count=$count; rm /tmp/whitespace;   echo 'Whiteout /boot' count=`df --sync -kP /boot | tail -n1 | awk -F ' ' '{print $4}'`; dd if=/dev/zero of=/boot/whitespace bs=1024 count=$count; rm /boot/whitespace;   ### Repeat the above for other partitions you have.   swappart=`cat /proc/swaps | tail -n1 | awk -F ' ' '{print $1}'` swapoff $swappart; dd if=/dev/zero of=$swappart mkswap $swappart; swapon $swappart;

Furthermore – about this script – USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK

Code style checking Prerequisites:

• You will need a recent enough version of puppet-lint that supports the --log-format flag. Install the gem so that the Jenkins can use it.
• On Jenkins, you will need the Warnings Plugin and the HTML Publisher Plugin.
• Make sure that when checking the module from your VCS, it ends up in WORKSPACE/modules/module_name.

Configuration: Jenkins

Go to the Configure System page and find the Compiler Warnings settings. Add a new console log parser and call it puppet-lint. I use following configuration for parsing puppet-lint warnings and errors.

Name:

puppet-lint

Regular Expression:

^\s*([^:]+):([0-9]+):([^:]+):([^:]+):\s*(.*)$

Mapping Script:

import hudson.plugins.warnings.parser.Warning // map regular expression to strings String fileName = matcher.group(1); String lineNumber = matcher.group(2); String kind = matcher.group(3); String check = matcher.group(4); String message = matcher.group(5); // return a Warning. return new Warning(fileName, Integer.parseInt(lineNumber), check, kind, message);

Example Log Message:

./manifests/params.pp:25:autoloader_layout:error:apache::params not in autoload module layout Jenkins job configuration

We will add several build steps that will run certain actions on our puppet modules.

1. Check syntax
2. Check style
3. Generate documentation

1. For the syntax check, I use following shell script (add a build step):

for file in $(find . -iname '*.pp'); do   puppet parser validate --color false --render-as s --modulepath=modules $file || exit 1; done;

2. For the style check, we use puppet-lint (add another build step):

find . -iname *.pp -exec puppet-lint --log-format "%{path}:%{linenumber}:%{check}:%{KIND}:%{message}" {} \;

3. And for generating documentation:

## Cleanup old docs. [ -d doc/ ] &amp;&amp; rm -rf doc/ ## Dummy manifests folder. ! [ -d manifests/ ] &amp;&amp; mkdir manifests/ ## Generate docs puppet doc --mode rdoc --manifestdir manifests/ --modulepath ./modules/ --outputdir doc   ## Fix docs to how I want them, I don't like that the complete workspace is included in all file paths. if [ -d ${WORKSPACE}/doc/files/${WORKSPACE}/modules ]; then mv -v "${WORKSPACE}/doc/files/${WORKSPACE}/modules" "${WORKSPACE}/doc/files/modules" fi; grep -l -R ${WORKSPACE} * | while read fname; do sed -i "s@${WORKSPACE}/@/@g" $fname; done;

In your post build section:

• Enable Scan for compiler warnings and select puppet-lint.
• Enable publish HTML reports (use ‘doc‘, ‘index.html‘ and ‘Puppet Docs‘ as values). This will add a link to the Job page linking your generated puppet docs.

That’s about it! Any suggestions / improvements on this are always welcome!

Notes:

• I have some examples/tests setup on my Jenkins instance for testing at http://jenkins.vstone.eu. Since I use this for testing, it might be offline / broken / buggy at times.
• The scripts I use may also require some changes if you are using an older version of puppet. I’m currently using 2.7.x for testing my modules.

Puppet modules…  How I feel about them in a dot file:

digraph PuppetModules {   node [     fontname = "Bitstream Vera Sans"     fontsize = 10     shape    = "record"   ]   edge [     fontname = "Bitstream Vera Sans"     fontsize = 10   ]   question [label="Do I need to edit a file in your module for changing settings?", shape="oval"] ok [label="Great.", shape="oval"] bah [label="You are doing it WRONG!", shape="oval"]   question -> ok [label="No"]   question -> bah [label="Yes"] }

Read on if you want a rendered version.

In the root directory of puppet trees, you could have a Vagrantfile. This is great, but a problem happens: when two people are working on the same tree, they will probably have their own vagrant files. That means that one of you do not commit his changes to the Vagrantfile, or you are managing multiple branches.

I have another idea: having multiple Vagrantfiles in the tree, named Vagrantfile.vm_name. Then, just add Vagrantfile to your .gitignore.

When you need to power up your specific Vagrant file, you just have to create a symbolic link like that:

$ ln -s Vagrantfile.roidelapluie Vagrantfile Easy and simple. If you want to go further you can create a "vagrantfiles" directory with all these Vagrantfiles.Tags: puppetvagrantgit

Given that @patrickdebois is working on improving data collection I thought it would be a good idea to describe the setup I currently have hacked together.

(Something which can be used as a starting point to improve stuff, and I have to write documentation anyhow)

I currently have 3 sources , and one target, which will eventually expand to at least another target and most probably more sources too.

The 3 sources are basically typical system data which I collect using collectd, However I`m using collectd-carbon from https://github.com/indygreg/collectd-carbon.git to send data to Graphite.

I`m parsing the Apache and Tomcat logfiles with logster , currently sending them only to Graphite, but logster has an option to send them to Ganglia too.

And I`m using JMXTrans to collect JMX data from Java apps that have this data exposed and send it to Graphite. (JMXTrans also comes with a Ganglia target option)

Rather than going in depth over the config it's probably easier to point to a Vagrant box I build https://github.com/KrisBuytaert/vagrant-graphite which brings up a machine that does pretty much all of this on localhost.

Obviously it's still a work in progress and lots of classes will need to be parametrized and cleaned up. But it's a working setup, and not just on my machine ..

If you are hacking on monitoring solutions, and want to talk to your peers solving the problem
Block the monday and tuesday after fosdem in your calendar !

That's right on february 6 and 7 a bunch of people interrested to fix the problem will be meeting , discussing and hacking stuff together in Antwerp

In short a #monitoringsucks hackathon

Inuits is opening up their offices for everybody who wants to join the effort Please let us (@KrisBuytaert and @patrickdebois) know if you want to join us in Antwerp

Obviously if you can't make it to Antwerp you can join the effort on ##monitoringsucks on Freenode or on Twitter.

The location will be Duboistraat 50 , Antwerp
It is about 10 minutes walk from the Antwerp Central Trainstation
Depending on Traffic Antwerp is about half an hour north of Brussels and there are hotels at walking distance from the venue.

Plenty of parking space is available on the other side of the Park

I`m parsing the responses of the Deploying Drupal survey I started a couple of months ago (more on that later)

One of the questions in the survey is "What is devops" , apparently when you ask a zillion people (ok ok, just a large bunch of Tweeps..), you get a large amount of different answers ranging from totally wrong to spot on.

So let's go over them and see what we can learn from them ..

The most Wrong definition one can give is probably :

• A buzzword

I think we've long passed the buzzword phase, definitely since it's not new, it's a new term we put to an existing practice. A new term that gives a lot of people that were already doing devops , a common word to dicuss about it. Also lots of people still seem to think that devops is a specific role, a job description , that it points to a specific group of people doing a certain job, it's not . Yes you'll see a lot of organisations looing for devops people, and giving them a devops job title. But it's kinda hard to be the only one doing devops in an organisation.

I described one of my current roles as Devops Kickstarter, it pretty much describes what I`m doing and it does contain devops :)

But devops also isn't

• The connection between operations and development.
• people that keep it running
• crazy little fellows who find beauty in black/white letters( aka code) rather than a view like that of Taj in a full moon light.
• the combination of developer and operations into one overall functionality
• The perfect mixture between a developer and a system engineer. Someone who can optimize and simplify certain flows that are required by developers and system engineers, but sometimes are just outside of the scope for both of them.
• Proxy between developer and management
• The people in charge of the build/release cycle and planning.
• A creature, made from 8-bit cells, with the knowledge of a seasoned developer, the skillset of a trained systems engineer and the perseverence of a true hacker.
• The people filling the gap between the developer world and the sysadmin world. They understand dev. issues and system issues as well. They use tools from both world to solve them.

Or

• Developers looking at the operations of the company and how we can save the company time and money

And it's definitely not

• Someone who mixes both a sysop and dev duties
• developers who know how to deploy and manage sites, including content and configuration.
• I believe there's a thin line line between Ops and Devs where we need to do parts of each others jobs (or at least try) to reach our common goal..
• A developer that creates and maintains environments tools to help other developers be more successful in building and releasing new products
• Developers who also do IT operations, or visa versa.
• Software developers that support development teams and assist with infrastructure systems

So no, developers that take on systems roles next to their own role and want to go for NoOps isn't feasable at all ..you really want collaboration, you want people with different skillsets that (try to) understand eachoter and (try to) work together towards a common goal.

Devops is also not just infrastructure as code

• Writing software to manage operations
• system administrators with a development culture.
• Bring code management to operations, automating system admin tasks.
• The melding of the art of Systems Administration and the skill of development with a focus on automation. A side effect of devops is the tearing down of the virtual wall that has existed between SA's and developers.
• Infrastructure as code.
• Applying some of the development worlds techniques (eg source control, builds, testing etc) to the operations world.
• Code for infrastructure

Sure infastructure as code is a big part of the Automation part listed in CAMS, but just because you are doing puppet/chef doesn't mean you are doing devops.
Devops is also not just continous delivery

• A way to let operations deploy sites in regular intervals to enable developers to interact on the systems earlier and make deployments easier.
• Devops is the process of how you go from development to release.

Obviously lots of people doing devops also often try to achieve Continuous delivery, but just like Infrastructure as Code it devops is not limited to that :)

But I guess the truth is somewhere in the definitions below ...

• That sweet spot between "operating system" or platform stack and the application layer. It is wanting sys admins who are willing to go beyond the normal package installers, and developers who know how to make their platform hum with their application.
• Breaking the wall between dev and ops in the same way agile breaks the wall between business and dev e.g. coming to terms with changing requirements, iterative cycles
• Not being an arsehole!
• Sysadmin best-practise, using configuration as code, and facilitating communication between sysadmins and developers, with each understanding and participating in the activities of the other.
• Devops is both the process of developers and system operators working closer together, as well as people who know (or who have worked in) both development and system operations.
• Culture collaboration, tool-chains
• Removing barriers to communication and efficiency through shared vocabulary, ideals, and business objectives to to deliver value.
• A set of principles and good practices to improve the interactions between Operations and Development.
• Collaboration between developers and sysadmins to work towards more reliable platforms
• Building a bridge between development and operations
• The systematic process of building, deploying, managing, and using an application or group of applications such as a drupal site.
• Devops is collaboration and Integration between Software Development and System Administration.
• Devops is an emerging set of principles, methods and practices for communication, collaboration and integration between software development (application/software engineering) and IT operations (systems administration/infrastructure) professionals.[1] It has developed in response to the emerging understanding of the interdependence and importance of both the development and operations disciplines in meeting an organization's goal of rapidly producing software products and services.
• bringing together technology (development) & content (management) closer together
• Making developers and admins understand each other.
• Communication between developers and systems folk.
• a cultural movement to improve agility between dev and ops
• The cultural extension of agile to bring operations into development teams.
• Tight collaboration of developers, operations team (sys admins) and QA-team.

But I can only conclude that there is a huge amount of evangelisation that still needs to be done, Lots of people still don't understand what devops is , or have a totally different view on it.

A number of technology conferences are and have taken up devops as a part of their conference program, inviting experienced people from outside of their focus field to talk about how they improve the quality of life !

There is still a large number of devops related problems to solve, so that's what I`ll be doing in 2012

(Warning some Ubuntu ranting ahead)

1. apt-get install virtualbox-ose
2. apt-get install rubygems
3. gem install vagrant

That's what I assumed it would take me to install vagrant on a spare Ubuntu (Natty) laptop.

Well it's not. after that I was greeted with some weirdness.

1. $vagrant
2. vagrant: command not found...

Yet gem list --local showed the vagrant gem installed.

1. $ruby
2. ruby: command not found

I looked twice, checked again and indeed it seems you can install rubygems on natty with no ruby installed #dazedandconfused

So unlike other distro's on Ubuntu doesn't add the rubygems binary path to it's default path
After adding that to my .bashrc things started working better.

The active reader has noticed that by now half of the Twittersphere was pointing me to the already implemented
above solution and the other half was telling me to not install rubygems using apt-get, or to use rvm for all my rubygem troubles

Apart from the point that if you need tools to like rvm to fix things that are fundamentally broken, the fact is that joe average java developer doens't want to be bothered with RubyGem hell , he just wants to do apt-get install Vagrant and get on with his real work, and that's exactly what I'd expect from Linux for human beings

I'd expect any junior guy to be able to go to vagrantup.com read the 4 commands on the main page and be up and running
Coz that's how it works on my Bleeding Edge Enterprise Development Distro, the one I usually would not advise those people (and my mother) to use.

This is a repost of my article earlier posted at Jordan Sissel's awesome SysAdvent

After years of working in Java-based environments, there are a number of things that I like to implement together with the teams I`m working with - the application doesn't matter much, whether it's plain java, Tomcat, JBoss, etc, these deployment strategies will help your ops and dev teams build more managable services.

Packaging

The first step is to have the native operating system packages as build artifacts rolling out of your continuous integration server - No .ear, .war or .jar files: I want to have rpms or debs. With things like fpm or the maven rpm plugin this should not be an extra hassle, and the advantages you get from doing this are priceless.

What advantages? Most native package systems support dependency resolution, file verification, and upgrades (or downgrades). These are things you would have to implement yourself or cobble together from multiple tools. As a bonus, your fellow sysadmins are likely already comfortable with the native package tool used on your systems, so why not do it?

Proxied, not running as root

Shaken, not stirred

Just like any other daemon, for security reasons, I prefer to run run Tomcat or JBoss as its own user, rather than as root. In most cases, however, only root can bind to ports below 1024, so you need to put a proxy in front. This is a convenient requirement because proxying (with something like Apache) can be used to terminate SSL connections, give improved logging (access logs, etc), and provides the ability to run multiple java application server instances on the same infrastructure.

Service Management

Lots of Java application servers have a semi functional shell script that allows you to start the service. Often, these services don't daemonize in a clean way, so that's why I prefer to use the Java Service wrapper from Tanuki to manage most Java based services. With a small config file, you get a clean way to stop and start java as a service and even the possibility to add some more monitoring to it.

However, there are some problems the Java Service wrapper leaves unsolved. For example, after launching the service, the wrapper can return back with a successful exit code while your service is not ready yet. The application server might be ready, but your applications themselves are still starting up. If you are monitoring these applications (e.g for High Availability), you really only want to treat them as 'active' when the application is ready, so you don't want your wrapper script to return, "OK," before the application has been deployed and ready. Otherwise, you end up with false positives or nodes that failover before the application has ever started. It's pretty easy to create a ping-pong service flapping scenario on a cluster this way.

One application per host

I prefer to deploy one application per host even though you can easily deploy multiple applications within a single Java VM. With one-per-host, management becomes much easier. Given the availability and popularity of good virtualization, the overhead of launching multiple Linux VM's for different applications is so low that there are more benefits than disadvantages.

Configuration

What about configuration of the application? Where should remote API urls, database settings, and other tunables go? A good approach is to create a standard location for all your applications, like /etc/$vendor/app/, where you place the appropriate configuration files. Volatile application configuration must be outside the artifact that comes out the build (.ear , .jar, .war, .rpm). The content of these files should be managed by a configuration management tool such as puppet, chef, or cfengine. The developers should be given a basic training so they can provide the systems team with the appropriate configuration templates.

Logs

Logs are pretty important too, and very easy to neglect. There are plenty of alternative tools around to log from a Java application: Log4j, Logback, etc .. Use them and make sure that they are configured to log to syslog, then they can be collected centrally and parsed by tools much easier than if they were spread all over the filesystem.

Monitoring

You also want your application to have some ways to monitor it besides just checking if it is running - it is usually insufficient to simply check if a tcp server is listening. A nice solution is to have a simple plain text page with a list of critical services and whether they are OK or not (true/false), for example:

1. someService: true
2. otherService: false

This benefits humans as well as machines. Tools like mon, heartbeat or loadbalancers can just grep for "false" in the file. If the file contains false, it reports a failure and fails over. This page should live on a standard location for all your applications, maybe a pattern like this http://host / servicename/health.html and an example "http://10.0.129.10:8080/mrs-controller/health.html". The page should be accessible as soon as the app is deployed.

This true/false health report should not be a static HTML file; it should be a dynamically generated page. Text means that you can also use curl, wget, or any command-line tool or browser to check the status of your service.

The 'health.html' page should report honestly about health, executing any code necessary to compute 'health' before yielding a result. For example, if your app is a simple calculator, it should verify health by doing tests internally like adding up some numbers before sharing 'myCalculator:true' in the health report.

The 'health.html' page should report honestly about health, executing any code necessary to compute 'health' before yielding a result. For example, if your app is a simple calculator, then before reporting health it should put two and two together and get four.

This kind of approach could also be used to provide you with metrics you can't learn from the JVM, such as number of concurrent users or other valid application metadata for measurement and trending purposes.

Conclusion

If you can't convince your developers, then maybe more data can help: Check out Martin Jackson's (presentation on java deployments) Automated Java Deployments with RPM

With good strategies in packaging, deployment, logging, and monitoring, you are in a good position to have an easily manageable, reproducible, and scalable environment. You'll give your developers the opportunity to focus on writing the application, they can use the same setup on their local development boxes (e.g. by using vagrant) as you are using on production.

Last week I was in Boston for my 1st and their 25th Edition of the Large Infrastructure System Administration Conferences
Lisa was pretty much all I expected from it. Old Unix wizards with long hair and white beards, the usual suspects, and a mix of devops practitioners on a devops themed conference with on one side awesome and well positioned content and on the other side absolutely basic stuff.

On tuesday I had a devops bof scheduled for 2 hours.

My goal of the session was to not talk myselve, and let the audience figure out the 4 key components of devops as documented by @botchagalupe and @damonedwards being , Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing. I have to admit it took me a while to get them to that point .. but they figured out themselves .. the bof was standing room only , and there was a good discussion going on

On wednesday I gave my talk titled , Devops the Future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.

Devops, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
View more presentations from Kris Buytaert

During my talk I realized that there was some more explanation needed for the crowd explaining Vagrant ... so I proposed a Bof on that topic too ... I used @patrickdebois 's awesome slides and hosted a small bof on Vagrant on thursday evening.

Vagrant devopsdays Mountain View 2011
View more presentations from Patrick Debois

Friday morning I was scheduled to be in a panel discussing featuring a #devops guy, a storage guy and a network guy ..
as my voice was starting to break down I wasn't really confident . however by the time the panel started I could talk normal again :)
The setup was weird.. it were basically 3 people with totally different backgrounds discussing a variety of topics. There were no rea
lly opposing views , mostly we agreed with eachother , so I`m not really sure if the audience was really entertained :)

Anyhow 2 bofs, a talk and a panel later .. I was exhausted and ready to fly back to Belgium.

Tomorrow I have another presentation together with Patrick at the BeJug .. problem is .. I`m still looking for my voice ;(

So worst case .. I`m just gonna turn on the recording that the Usenix folks made of my talk ...

Must admit .. I've given better talks ..

For further reference .. and preventing me from googling it a 3rd time

1. qrencode "http://www.krisbuytaert.be/" -o qrcode.png -s 10

or

1. cat Kris_Buytaert.vcf | qrencode -o vcf.png -s 5

Back in late 1997 I had spent way too much time helping people to build websites and was fed up with customers wanting a different shade of green for the background of their website. I was fed up with the graphic artists that didn't want to understand the concept of a color pallet and browser safe colors and didn't understand the differences between print and web. So I decided to try not to work for the wannabe webexperts anymore and doing some real software.

Fast forward 15 years and I find myselve discussing the different shades of green with developers ... maybe it's time for some radical change again :)

You got to love Geek & Poke

You can, from now on, find any vagrant box I package here: http://packages.vstone.org/vagrant-boxes

Note:
Boxes that end with .box-pp are packaged with my modified Vagrantfile which has been preconfigured for use with puppet. In addition there are some optional commands available to do (puppet) development quicker. See vagrant-addons @ github for more information on this subject.

If you set a SUID flag on a file, this flag will disappear when the ownership (user or group) is changed of that file!

Let me show you:

[root@raskas ~]# touch test
[root@raskas ~]# ll test
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2011-06-22 17:10 test
[root@raskas ~]# chmod u+s test
[root@raskas ~]# ll test
-rwSr--r-- 1 root root 0 2011-06-22 17:10 test
[root@raskas ~]# chown johan:johan test
[root@raskas ~]# ll test
-rw-r--r-- 1 johan johan 0 2011-06-22 17:10 test
[root@raskas ~]# chmod u+s test
[root@raskas ~]# ll test
-rwSr--r-- 1 johan johan 0 2011-06-22 17:10 test
[root@raskas ~]# chown root:root test
[root@raskas ~]# ll test
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2011-06-22 17:10 test
[root@raskas ~]#

First blog post for a long time, let's try post interesting stuffs I find during my work as GNU/Linux system administrator at Inuits.

I was looking for a clean and easy way to manage network interface configuration on Debian-like system (the /etc/network/interfaces file) using Puppet.

Puppet currently doesn't have a resource type to handle network interfaces and unlike Redhat-like systems where the network configuration is split in a different file per interface, the interfaces configuration file under Debian is monolithic making it difficult to manage.

So here comes Augeas to the rescue. Augeas is a configuration file parser that map a configuration file into a tree. Puppet provides a native Resource type you can work with it in your puppet recipes.

Let's say you want to generate the following stanza in /etc/network/interfaces (this create a bond interface):

auto bond0 iface bond0 inet static     address 192.168.110.42     netmask 255.255.255.0     network 192.168.110.0     gateway 192.168.110.240     slaves eth0 eth1     bound_mode active-backup     bond_miimon 100     bond_downdelay 200     bond_updelay 200

You can define the following ressource:

augeas{ "bond_interface" :     context => "/files/etc/network/interfaces",     changes => [         "set auto[child::1 = 'bond0']/1 bond0",         "set iface[. = 'bond0'] bond0",         "set iface[. = 'bond0']/family inet",         "set iface[. = 'bond0']/method static",         "set iface[. = 'bond0']/address 192.168.110.42",         "set iface[. = 'bond0']/netmask 255.255.255.0",         "set iface[. = 'bond0']/network 192.168.110.0",         "set iface[. = 'bond0']/gateway 192.168.110.240",         "set iface[. = 'bond0']/slaves 'eth0 eth1'",         "set iface[. = 'bond0']/bound_mode active-backup",         "set iface[. = 'bond0']/bond_miimon 100",         "set iface[. = 'bond0']/bond_downdelay 200",         "set iface[. = 'bond0']/bond_updelay 200",     ], }

and Puppet will take care of creating the resource and updating it. Be aware that the interfaces and options not managed by puppet are left untouched.

We are running a heartbeat cluster with several resource groups. One of these groups is depending on a drbd disk which is configured as a master/slave resource.
Everything was working fine with heartbeat v3.0.1 and pacemaker v1.0.7…

Until we upgraded to heartbeat v3.0.3 and pacemaker v1.1.5.
When we tried to swap the resource group depending on the drbd disk, the resource group was stopped but the drbd master / slave resource refused to demote the current master.
Resulting in the unavailability of the resource group.

Mentioning this problem on #linux-ha they pointed me to resource-stickiness in the configuration.

In our configuration the resource-stickiness is set to INFINITY, we have configured it like that because we only want resources to swap during a failure or when manually requested, in all other cases the resource should remain on the node where it currently is. This is not the case when the resource-stickiness is not configured.

Apparently setting it to INFINITY was a bit radical, setting the resource-stickiness to 1000 is sufficient. The resources only swaps during a failure or manually triggered and the drbd master / slave resources follows the resource group using it.

Found some time to recreate a test environment for various things once and again. The ‘previous version’ used libvirt to control KVM instances with bridged networking. All of this quite well working setup was running on my home ’server’. On my day-to-day work laptop I have been using Virtualbox to quickly test some stuff from time to time. And that’s why Vagrant got my attention.
After a very quick re-install of my old and beloved linux distro Arch Linux (got it booted from the LVM root finally, thank you dracut) it was time to get going.

Installation of Vagrant is a breeze (no distro packages yet, just a gem)
Following the quick start on their site got me going in no time.
I stopped right after getting port forwards in. The next step handled packaging your configured VMs, which Vagrant builds using some base image downloaded somewhere. Getting a base image might already be a bit evil (who knows what ‘base’ means to someone else anyway) , and packaging your configured instance afterwards is just more evil
So I enabled my favourite config management tool (Vagrant had default Chef and Puppet support), added the manifests, and that’s all that’s needed. Next time you ‘vagrant up’ it’ll re-apply it all.

Right now, I’m having a look at Veewee, kind of an ‘addon’ tool to create your own ‘boxes’!