OpenStack command line clients are a pile of Python modules and dependencies and can be a real joy to install. On Linux there are often vendor-maintained packages available to simplify the task and capture all of the dependencies, while on Windows it is a completely different story as no version of Windows includes any version of Python out of the box. There are three layers to the Python stack to get the OpenStack clients (or any Python app really) installed and working on Windows: a Python interpreter/runtime, the Python modules that provide an interface to PyPI, and the client libraries

[Updated 01Oct2013 to correct spelling and command formatting] This is the next installment in the never-ending series of OpenStack image builds. Today's target: CentOS Image Characteristics The usual suspects are present: minimal package install serial console support timezone is Etc/UTC hostname set to instance name a single partition with root filesystem, no swap grow root filesystem to device size enable EPEL (install epel-release) enable could-init repo to get 0.7.1 A few things are still lacking: selinux is in permissive mode, make enforcing strengthen default firewall Build Tools like Oz are a good idea in theory but in practice seem to

The OpenStack Developer Summit has just concluded in Portland, OR, and by many measures was an enormous success. Enormous because there were a reported >2800 people in attendance. I never heard a breakdown of how many of those were developers but I'd guess that that number was up too. The rooms were generally full but usually only a handful of people actively participated in most sessions. And speaking of full rooms, most of the 'project-formerly-known-as-Quantum' sessions were SRO. I skipped those due to other interests but the word is none of the network vendors did. Most of my time was

[Updated 01Oct2013 to correct spelling and command formatting] Building images to boot in a cloud can be a lot of fun, especially since no two clouds are built alike. Now fortunately the differences are mostly minor, but some of the minor differences can be fatal. Ugh. Good News The recent release of Fedora 18 brought with it a pleasant surprise, the build of some images suitable for loading into your favorite cloud, ala Ubuntu's UEC images. The mailing list notice gives the background and a reply in that thread mentions some desirable changes. So in order to make those changes

In the first part of this series we covered creating a pair of certificate authorities and a signed certificate with the same attributes commonly found in commercial certificates. This part covers the OpenStack Python clients and proper certificate verification. The OpenStack client repositories (or packages) include both the Python API bindings and the reference command line interface (CLI) implementation to communicate with the OpenStack APIs. Client support for modern encrypted connections, i.e SSLv3 and/or TLSv1, has been spotty at best. Most of the clients are capable of using SSL for encryption but often the certificate verification part of the protocol