OpenStack

If you’ve ever had to export and move volumes from one OpenStack cloud to another, you may know the following process: converting a Cinder volume to a Glance image to allow you to download it so that the reverse process can be applied when importing it. This is obviously a laborious process, especially if there are a ton of volumes to port. I recently had to do a bulk import of more than 100 volumes in qcow2 format for a client migrating to our cloud....

Context A client reached out to me a little while ago to ask if it was possible to recover access to a VM that one of his clients use. This Ubuntu 22.04 based VM runs on our OpenStack cloud, powered by QEMU/KVM. The client’s client had made some modifications to /etc/ssh/sshd_config and subsequently locked themselves out of the machine. It’s important to note here that cloud instances (VMs) typically don’t include a default password set and rely solely on key-pair authentication via SSH....

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....