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Jun
25thRazor OSS #2 : Public Release of MK
Shortly after the open-source release of Razor in late May, we started to see requests from users for more information about the Microkernel that is used by Razor. What distribution was used as the basis for this Microkernel? What services does it provide? What is involved in building a custom Microkernel that will support my hardware? Will the Microkernel be open-sourced as well? If so, will it be part of the Razor project or a separate (but related) project? At the same time that these requests started coming in from the Razor community, we saw our first Razor issue that was directly linked to the Razor Microkernel. The issue was with support for a networking card that we hadn’t seen before (the Broadcom NetXtreme II card) that was presenting some issues for a Razor user (The Microkernel it wasn’t checking in with the Razor server on machines that used this network card because the it couldn’t connect to the underlying network). In the end, the issue turned out to be that the firmware needed to support this network card was not included in the Microkernel (even though firmware for this card that would work with our Microkernel was readily available). Our intention all along was to make this project publically available, but we still hadn’t worked out the last remaining issues around automating the build of a Microkernel ISO from the Razor Microkernel project itself (at the time of the Razor release late last month the process of building a [...]
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Jun
5thAPI All The Things! : Razor API Wiki
I mentioned in a slightly important recent post that Razor, the new cloud provisioning tool for bare & virtual metal, has a full RESTful API. Now I back that up with some documentation. Freshly added to the Razor Wiki on github is a overview of the Razor API. This includes examples on the JSON format and code samples for Adding, Removing, Updating, and Getting Razor configuration. And I took the time to provide code samples for each section in Ruby, Perl, Python, Java, C# and PowerShell (for my PS buddies, you know who you are). Go read it here : Razor API Overview This is the tip of the spear and there will be more documents on API elements for each Razor Slice. The Razor project is in beta and so the API may change as things move forward. Also, since this is a community project. If you have ideas or code that will improve anything please fork and submit a pull request. Feedback & comments appreciated. .nick
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Mar
1stUBERLinkedTwit : Chambers special
So my buddy posted the following tweet today: And since I had some calls today I decided to kick off a project to do just that. So here is a simple github link for UBERLinkedTwit: Basically a command line ruby script which using the LinkedIn gem to auth, pull, and grab twitter ID’s for your connections. I haven’t rigged it up to auto-follow using the Twitter gem yet. But that is pretty easy using the Twitter gem examples. Hit the github project, get LinkedIn developer keys, read the README, and have fun. Free free to extend and I will pull into main project. .nick
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Dec
19thProving a another guy’s point : MacBook Air & Node.js as a Webserver
Ok, this is a real quick example of someone else’s idea. Namely Christofer Hoff of Juniper (infamous blog & twitter account) who in response to my tweet about my MacBook and a webserver (I am a Mac-newbie). Suggested I try using Node.js. At first I was a little taken back. I think @Beaker thought I didn’t get the point (and I don’t more than I do). So I *cheated* and just turned on Web Sharing with the good tips from my other twitter buddies. But the Node.js idea bugged me because technically Chris is right. It should work fine. So I did it. I installed the Node.js package for OSX (been using the Linux version) and fired up TextEdit and wrote this simple bit of code: var http = require(’http’); var fs = require(’fs’); var path = require(’path’); var rootpath = "/Users/lynxbat/Webroot"; console.log(’*Starting’); http.createServer(function (request, response) { console.log(’Server started’); var pathToFile = rootpath + request.url; console.log (’File was requested: ‘ + pathToFile); path.exists(pathToFile, function(exists) { if (exists) { fs.readFile(pathToFile, function(error, content) { if (error) { response.writeHead(500); response.end(); } else { response.writeHead(200, { ‘Content-Type’: ‘application/x-gzip’ }); response.end(content); }}); } else { response.writeHead(404); response.end(); }}); }).listen(8010); console.log(’Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8010/’); I fired up the server: node webserver.js And opened my Safari browser to request a file I had dropped in my root directory. Which works perfectly. Output on cli: *Starting Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8010/ Server started File was requested: /Users/lynxbat/Webroot/node-v0.6.6.pkg Now in my case I am using the Webserver to hand [...]
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Nov
7thFor Advanced Users : UBERAlign API / CLI / Powershell
From the beginning I knew some UBERAlign users would want to go into power user mode. The UBERAlign Console was designed to allow for easy use for the average Joe. But, there are people out there with the desire, guts, and ability to script and automate that want more. So this post will inform you on two other options for UBERAlign. 1. The CLI Each vAligner is a Ubuntu Linux VM. On the VM is a set of binary files that do all work. One is a startup file for initializing, one is a daemon for accepting new jobs via the REST API, and the final is the actual magic behind the scenes. From the beginning UBERAlign was designed to be run from the command line. In fact back months ago the vSpecialist actually got a copy of this to try out and help me test. So for those that do not want to use the Console here are some reasons and instructions on how to run alignment, reclaim, and alignment+reclaim jobs manually. Some of the reasons you may want to do this: Hate MS Windows – Since the console is a .Net WPF app some Mac users (@mcowger) have already asked how to skip using a Windows VM. VM size is too big – If the VM is more than 50% of the size of the datastore then a snapshot of it can potentially cause an out of space issue if it grows to full size (which and align [...]
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Mar
2ndMore PS Fun : Fix vCenter Startup w/ PowerShellMore to come on this, but I am working more hands-on lately in my role as a vSpecialist. As part of this I am going to make an effort to post every *shortcut* I come up with along the way. And I love shortcuts… So here is another PowerShell trick. As many of you have experienced. If you have a local SQL server installation (express or not) of vCenter you will sometimes have vCenter not start correctly on boot. This is do to a race condition between the SQL Server services and vCenter. If SQL doesn’t beat vCenter then vCenter will not start. The correct way to fix this is to setup the Dependencies with the vCenter VPXD service to wait till SQL has done its business first. There are actually several good articles out there on how to do this manually. I don’t like to anything manually, so here is a PowerShell script to auto-detect and configure vCenter startup for local SQL installs. It is setup to work with SQL server or SQL server express. I think I got all bases covered but you can easily customize as you like (or use on other services).
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