Tag Archives: rdo

RDO on CentOS 7

With CentOS 7 now available, I quickly put it on my OpenStack demo laptop, and started installing RDO. It mostly just worked, but there were a few roadblocks to circumvent.

As usual, I followed the RDO Quickstart, so I won’t duplicate those steps here, in detail, but it goes like:


sudo yum update -y && sudo yum install -y http://rdo.fedorapeople.org/rdo-release.rpm && sudo yum install -y openstack-packstack && packstack --allinone

Comparison of string with 7 failed

The first problem occurs pretty quickly, in prescript.pp, with the following error message:

Comparison of String with 7 failed

This is due to the change in CentOS versioning scheme – the latest release of CentOS is version 7.0.1406, which is not a number. The script in question assumes that the version number is a number, and does a numerical comparison:


if $::operatingsystem in $el_releases and $::operatingsystemrelease < 7 {
...

This fails, because $::operatingsystemrelease is a string, not a number.

The solution here is to edit the file /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/packstack/puppet/templates/prescript.pp and replace the variable $::operatingsystemrelease with $::operatingsystemmajrelease around line 15.

While you’re at it, do this for every file in that directory, where $operatingsystemrelease is compared to 7.

See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1117035 for more detail, and to track when this is fixed.

mysql vs mariadb

The second problem, I’m not sure I understand just yet. The symptom is that mysql.pp fails with


Error: Could not enable mysqld:

To skip to the end of the story, this appears to be related to the switch from mysql to mariadb about a year ago, finally catching up with CentOS. The related bug is at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=981116

The workaround that I used was:

# rm /usr/lib/systemd/system/mysqld.service 
# cp /usr/lib/systemd/system/mariadb.service /usr/lib/systemd/system/mysqld.service
# systemctl stop mariadb
# pkill mysql
# rm -f /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

Then run packstack again with the generated answer file from the last time.

However, elsewhere in the thread, we were assured that this shouldn’t be necessary, so YMMV. See https://www.redhat.com/archives/rdo-list/2014-July/msg00055.html for further discussion.

That’s all, folks

After those two workarounds, packstack completed successfully, and I have a working allinone install.

Hope this was helpful to someone.

UPDATE: The next time through, I encountered https://ask.openstack.org/en/question/35705/attempt-of-rdo-aio-install-icehouse-on-centos-7/

The workaround is to replace contents of /etc/redhat-release with “Fedora release 20 (Heisenbug)” and rerun packstack.

Turns out that this also fixes the mysql/mariadb problem above without having to go through the more complicated process.

Day One at LinuxCon

Although much of yesterday at LinuxCon was spent in a jet-lagged fog, it was a great first day. I arrived at the Edinburgh airport at 8 in the morning (I know, I should have come a day or two early!) and took the bus to downtown, then walked up to the conference venue. It’s a lovely conference center located a short walk from numerous lovely pubs, bakeries, and shops.

I spent most of the day at the OpenStack booth, talking with people about what OpenStack is, as well as with people who have been using it for a long time and had deeper questions, or wanted to share what they’re doing with it.

In the evening, I met up with several colleagues – one of whom I had talked with online but never met – for dinner and discussion. I’m frequently impressed by my coworkers and their passion to solve problems, rather than simply jockeying for position and prowess. These guys really want to identify and squash bugs, both technical and relational. I love it.

After a very long day (I was up for nearly 40 hours, I think – time zones confuse me) I finally crashed around 9pm and got 11 hours of sleep. I feel much more human today and am really looking forward to the day. I have a few interviews I have tentatively scheduled for today and tomorrow to record for the RDO blog. Hopefully I can track these folks down.

RedHat Summit Summary

Last week I attended the Red Hat Summit in Boston. It was, for me, equal parts pep rally and intensive OpenStack training.

Jim Whitehurst’s keynote was just great, because it reemphasized how much RedHat really *gets* Open Source, at all levels of the organization. So, this part was pep rally for me, and confirmed to me that RedHat is the place where I want to be. Same for Paul Cormier’s keynote. Both of these are well worth watching if you care about cloud computing, IaaS, or PaaS, or expect to at any time in the near future.

I attended a number of sessions about OpenStack, and you can see a wrapup of all of that content in Perry’s blog post about the conference.

And I helped out at the RDO table in the Developers Lounge. In the process I met many of the engineers that I’ll be working with, and I learned quite a bit about RDO and OpenStack, as well as who I need to go to when there’s something I don’t know yet. And I got to play around some with TryStack, a free service where you can experiment with an RDO installation, launch virtual machines, and connect in to them to see how RDO behaves.

There’s a huge amount of interest in OpenStack, and the ecosystem around it is full of really cool stuff. I was particularly interested in OpenShift, with which you can launch a non-trivial webapp in just minutes minutes. Very cool stuff.

Another high point of the week was the RedHat Summit 5K.

RedHat Summit, Boston

There were a few hundred people in the race, which wasn’t a traditional road race, in the sense that there wasn’t any official time keeper, and traffic wasn’t stopped. We had pace groups (I ran with the 8:30 minute group), and a pacer who knew the route. I had set a goal of breaking 27, and I ran a 25:32, with which I was very pleased. This was the first 5k I’ve run since, I believe, 1994, so, not too shabby.