For the past little while, I’ve been quite involved in hardware automation. Whether it’s spinning up cloud environments (with OpenStack) or working with services on bare-metal machines outside of a cloud-like environment, the common requirement is: Power Internet (sometimes optional) Networking switches Servers (for compute, storage, or both) Cables (sometimes numerous) This blog post will focus on some of my recent experiences with Cumulus Linux, as I’ve had to deal with it as part of a deployment for an OpenStack cloud....

A little while ago I spent some time writing various Ansible roles and playbooks for the infrastructure at my place of work. My Ansible skills are intermediate and by no means refined. As a result of this, a lot of the roles were not developed to best practice specifications. I took some time to try to improve my roles and properly test them before using them by taking advantages of the free continuous testing service that Travis-CI offers....

If you’re impatient, skip to the solution section 😃 Over the last few months I’ve been working with the University of Cape Town on the Ilifu research cloud project. The focus for the initial release of the cloud is mainly to provide compute and storage to astronomy and bioinformatics use cases. The technology powering this cloud is the ever-growing-in-popularity combination of OpenStack (Queens release) as the virtualization platform and Ceph (Luminous) as the storage backend....

Blasting Students with Science I was recently invited to give a workshop on reproducible scientific workflows to students as part of the Inter-university Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy’s (IDIA) “JEDI” programme. The overall purpose of this workshop was to introduce students from the African continent to various topics that are being dealt with in the data science space. A large focus here was machine learning. This post details some of my experiences with preparing the original pipeline, working CWL around it and also teaching people how to do it....

While configuring some of the internal services that we host for external access through our NGINX proxy VM, I started noticing some strange behaviour. Every once in a little while, when requesting a page that was being passed through the proxy, the proxy server would respond with a 502 Bad Gateway. It turns out that there were some issues with the resolver module for NGINX. I’ll detail how I fixed it below....