Flock - http://flocktofedora.org/ - is starting tomorrow in Charlotte, SC. I’m going to be there, hoping to meet some of you, and talk about what you’re doing with OpenStack and RDO. Look for me - I’ll be wearing a red fedora and a red RDO shirt.

Thanks for being part of the RDO community!

July was a busy month, and we have a lot to tell you about. If you want to keep up with what’s going on with RDO in the coming month, the best way is to follow the RDO forum, at http://bit.ly/13YEwCe, or to follow us on Twitter at @rdocommunity

If you’d like to manage your mailing list subscription, or invite other people to join the list, you can do that at http://red.ht/11amemL

OSCon and Flock

In July, we were at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon, as part of the OpenStack pavilion. Thanks to those of you who stopped by to talk with us.

There was a lot of great OpenStack content at OSCon, and our own Dave Neary led the ‘OpenStack Distro Smackdown’ session (http://bit.ly/15FwwfK ).

We also attended the OpenStack third birthday party, where we got to celebrate this great journey we’re on. One of the (many) things that makes Open Source so cool is the ability to collaborate with our competitors to make the world a better place, and OpenStack is a great example of that. A big thank you and congratulations to the entire OpenStack family.

If you missed OSCon, come to Flock (http://flocktofedora.org/ ), August 9-12 (this weekend!) in Charleston, South Carolina. Flock is a gathering of Fedora developers, and we’ll be there talking with some of the people who make RDO happen. On Saturday, Kashyap Chamarthy will be leading the OpenStack Test event, in which participants will set up and test the latest OpenStack packages on Fedora. (Details at http://bit.ly/15KJGFV )

If you’re attending, or hosting, any OpenStack meetups, we’d love to hear about them and help you get the word out. Drop us a note on the RDO forum, or send us a tweet.

Videos

In the last few weeks, we’ve put a vew videos on YouTube, showing some simple tasks with OpenStack and RDO. We started with a demo of TryStack.org, the site where you can take OpenStack for a test run without having to set it up yourself. (http://bit.ly/15FIhD0 ). And, more recently, we published the video we put together for OSCon, showing an installation of OpenStack using RDO, all the way through spinning up a virtual machine and ssh’ing into it. (http://bit.ly/13YQ20f )

In the coming weeks and months, we’ll be publishing more of these, showing you how to do various other tasks with OpenStack. You’ll find those in our YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWYIPZ4lm4P3_pzZ9Hx9awg

Networking with RDO

We’ve had a lot of discussion in the RDO forum about networking over the last month. With Neutron support coming to RDO, but not quite mature yet, some people are having trouble getting networking running.

To address this difficulty, we’ve added a networking resource in the wiki (http://rdoproject.org/Networking ) where we can share what works, and what doesn’t, to help you get things running smoothly.

Also, we’ve updated the QuickStart instructions (http://rdoproject.org/Quickstart ) to disable Neutron (formerly known as Quantum) networking, so that you can have a better first-time experience when installing RDO.

Remember that you can also generate an answer file, using the ‘–gen-answer-file=ANSWER_FILE’ argument, edit that file to set your preferences, and then run packstack using this file as input, using the ‘–answer-file=ANSWER_FILE’ argument.

Using Ceph for Block Storage

There’s been a lot of interest lately around Ceph (http://ceph.com/ ), the distributed object store and filesystem, and using it with OpenStack. Our friends at Inktank were kind enough to add some documentation to the RDO wiki about using Ceph for block storage with RDO - http://bit.ly/13K3m9G This is a detailed, step-by-step how-to, showing the entire process of installing RDO, configuring Ceph, and getting the two to talk to each other.

Troubleshooting

Because RDO tracks the latest releases of OpenStack, and because of the inevitable variation in deployment platforms, you may encounter some problems during deployment. (The Red Hat Entperprise Linux OpenStack Platform, which trails upstream by a few months, is more thoroughly hardened and tested.)

As you’re working through these problems, you may wish to have a look at the troubleshooting page on our wiki - http://rdoproject.org/Troubleshooting - where we’re trying to document common scenarios that people are encountering, and tips for solving these problems.

We welcome your participation in this process. If you find the solution to some problem, please write it up so that everyone can benefit.

Other sources

We recently came across this writeup of using RDO to deploy a multi-node OpenStack cloud: http://www.cloudbase.it/rdo-multi-node/ . It’s a very deep dive into how everything fits together, as well as hands-on configuration tips and examples. This is part one of a promised series, so we encourage you to check back there.

If you come across helpful articles that you think will benefit the entire community, please post them to the RDO forum, or send them directly to me at rbowen@redhat.com

In closing …

Thanks again for being part of the RDO community. We’d love to hear how we can do better. Let us know on the forum (http://rdoproject.org/forum/ ), or on Twitter (@rdocommunity), or just drop us email at rbowen@redhat.com or on the RDO mailing list (http://red.ht/12XFRiy )

Until next month …

Rich and Dave, for the RDO community

There are two updates to packstack packages:

Packstack package has been updated in RDO Grizzly EPEL6 repo to openstack-packstack-2013.1.1-0.22.dev653.el6. (Details at https://www.redhat.com/archives/rdo-list/2013-August/msg00002.html)

Packstack package has been updated in RDO Havana EPEL6 repo to openstack-packstack-2013.2.1-0.1.dev691.el6. (Details at https://www.redhat.com/archives/rdo-list/2013-August/msg00003.html)

Think it’s impossible to stand up an OpenStack cloud in 15 minutes? If you’re the betting kind, Red Hat software engineer, Derek Higgins, is ready to take your money. Derek created Packstack, an installation utility that uses Puppet modules to deploy OpenStack in three easy steps. Not convinced? Join Derek Higgins, Cody Herridges, and Chris Hoge for a free webinar on Tuesday, July 30 at 11am PDT to see a live demo of Packstack.

You can read more about it, and register, at https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/s/registrations/new?cid=lespaq0blwhj

Our friends in Inktank recently added a new page to the wiki documenting the process for enabling Ceph for block storage on RDO.

This has been a popular request from RDO users in addition to the documentation and support for Gluster as a storage back-end. Let us know how it works!

We’re starting another day at OSCon, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. It’s been a great week so far, with lots of great conversations with users, and potential users, of RDO.

If you’re at the conference, please drop by and say hi. Or follow us on @RDOCommunity for periodic updates through the day.

There are now 4 separate Havana repositories available on RDO

Trunk packages for Fedora and EL6 derivatives

The current trunk package series, generated by http://smokestack.openstack.org/ with maximum lag of 1 hour from the latest trunk commit are available for Fedora and more recently EL6 based distributions. Please see the README or browse these repositories at: http://rdo.fedorapeople.org/openstack/openstack-trunk/

Standard Havana repositories for Fedora and EL6 derivatives

Also we now have the more standard release repository for Havana, which contains the recently released Havana milestone 2 packages. The best way to interact with this repository is to follow the RDO quick start guide at: http://rdoproject.org/Quickstart while just replacing “grizzly” with “havana” in step 1. This package set can be used with EL6 based distros or Fedora 19. Fedora 19 contains OpenStack Grizzly packages in the official Fedora repositories, and RDO makes the next OpenStack version available for test and evaluation. These repositories can be browsed at: http://rdo.fedorapeople.org/openstack/openstack-havana/

A caveat to note with the above repositories, is that the openstack-neutron packages are not yet available. These will be made available in the coming days.

thanks, Pádraig.

We’re at OSCon today, in the OpenStack pavilion. If you’re here, please drop by and say hi. We’ll be there all day.

From the RDO-list mailing list (https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rdo-list)

update: openstack-packstack-2013.1.1-0.20.dev642.el6

Wed Jul 10 2013 - Martin Mágr mmagr@redhat.com - 2013.1.1-0.20.dev642

• Fixed provider network option (#976380)
• Made token_format configurable (#978853)
• Enable LVM snap autoextend (#975894)
• MariaDB support (#981116)

Older releases:

Tue Jun 18 2013 - Martin Mágr mmagr@redhat.com - 2013.1.1-0.19.dev632

• Restart openstack-cinder-volume service (#975007)

Wed Jun 12 2013 - Martin Mágr mmagr@redhat.com - 2013.1.1-0.17.dev631

• Updated Keystone puppet module to have token_format=PKI as default

Tue Jun 11 2013 - Martin Mágr mmagr@redhat.com - 2013.1.1-0.16.dev630

• Always update kernel package (#972960)

Mon Jun 10 2013 - Martin Mágr mmagr@redhat.com - 2013.1.1-0.15.dev625

• Omit Nova DB password only on compute nodes (#966325)
• Find free device during host startup (#971145)

Mon Jun 10 2013 - Martin Mágr mmagr@redhat.com - 2013.1.1-0.14.dev622

• Reverted Nova sql_connection changes because of introduced regression (#966325, #972365)

Thu Jun 06 2013 - Martin Mágr mmagr@redhat.com - 2013.1.1-0.12.dev621

• Install qemu-kvm before libvirt (#957632)
• Add template for quantum API server (#968513)
• Removed SQL password in sql_connection for compute hosts (#966325)
• Fixed color usage (#971075)
• Activate cinder-volumes VG and scan PVs after reboot (#971145)

Wed Jun 05 2013 - Martin Mágr mmagr@redhat.com - 2013.1.1-0.9.dev605

• Added whitespace filter to Nova and Quantum plugins (rhbz#970674)
• Removed RDO repo installation procedure

In case you missed it, the inaugural edition of the RDO Community Newsletter may be read at https://www.redhat.com/archives/rdo-newsletter/2013-July/msg00000.html

If you didn’t receive it and would like to receive the next one, you can can subscribe at https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rdo-newsletter

If there’s something you think we should cover in the August newsletter, please let us know.