Troubleshooting

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....

I encountered an issue booting Ubuntu Server 16.04 when installing it on a SuperMicro server that had been configured with Software RAID 1. The operating system install script would detect that a RAID environment was active and it would install correctly, but when booting into the newly installed system I would be presented with a blank screen and a blinking cursor. Grub wasn’t even loading. To solve this issue I booted into a live CD of Ubuntu 16....