DevStack as my private cloud?

if your tired of manually managing your own ad hoc "private cloud"
on your laptop, maybe you should setup an openstack deployment?

Note: Ever since I tried DevStack, I realized PackStack is way simpler - DevStack does alot of very sophisticated things but is tricky to debug - Packstack, on the other hand - is a product that is puppet based, thus minor tweaks are easy to encode (for example, if you have mysql installed, its easy to change the MySQL puppet recipe in Packstack).  Packstack is so easy - I didn't even have to blog post it - instead I just fresh installed Fedora 20 and followed the instructions At the Red Hat RDO site. )


For those still interested in running devstack, here are my notes. 

Grab the DevStack source code (clone it from git), modify the local.conf file, and then run the ./stack.sh  script. 


DISCLAIMER: Devstack is for dev, not production.  So, even though its easy to spin it up on a machine, I doubt this will service the needs of a real company needing to carve up its servers into VM zones.

In any case... Ive got enough random projects  that maybe devstack can help me manage VMs a little cleaner. 

I got tired off spinning VMs on my laptop. 

So im creating a private cloud for myself...... Lets see how this goes :)

I started with DevStack (the OpenStack automated cloud creator for a simple setup). 

DevStack is not for production setups.  But I think for my home dev tasks, it will probably work.

I ran into lots of dumb errors during this process.  Heres what they were.

Couldnt contact host (etc/hosts)

For some reason, I had initially set my hostname to something like "a-y-z".  Of course, that is offensively wrong in so many ways.  So - I fixed the hostname to a.b.c.  I also made sure it was in /etc/hosts, and I made it permanant by calling

cp -pr /etc/sysconfig/network /etc/sysconfig/network.bak

Mysql password error (ran same recipe twice, second time changed conf file, then got an error. duh)

If you run devstack mutliple times to start up, you might change your conf.local in the process.  The mysql instance (i think) sticks around - so you have to keep the same password for it. 

Firewall: I wasn't able to access the web ui from other machines on my home network, so I followed this to turn of firewalls.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21709827/how-to-turn-firewall-off-fedora

Freezing: Fedora 20 has some smarts in it to freeze every once in a while....  You can turn them off by grabbing dconf-editor and customizing it as shown here: 

https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/9809/how-do-i-disable-suspend-when-my-laptop-is-plugged-in-and-closed/

But after the few minor hassles --- in an afternoon I was able to have my own private cloud running on my new server!