openstack – Calgary RHCE

Home lab, CAT6 wiring, and rack

September 13, 2017 By Andrew Ludwar Leave a Comment

Between being busy with home renovations, and writing articles for work, I haven’t made much time for blogging this summer. Since it’s raining today and hampering my home renos, I’m finally getting to a post on the work I did wiring my house with CAT 6, and setting up a home lab rack in the basement. I realise having a rack in your house is a little ridiculous, but for those folks who like to tinker or need more resources than a desktop PC or laptop, it is incredibly useful (and affordable) to have. Like others, my home lab serves up some basic components for my home network, and also allows a testing ground that gets quite a bit of usage.

CAT6 Home Wiring:

This is a much easier project than most think. It goes a long way to offer connectivity to the various devices in your home, as well as increases your home’s market value. While I have home WiFi, its nice to be able to offer high speed bandwidth and reliability to every room in your house, and use the WiFi solely for areas that are difficult to run cable to. Moreover, its a much better WiFi experience to extend access points via wired switching than bridging antenneas. To put it candidly, I’ve never had to buffer any Netflix show off my PS3 or otherwise since running cable 🙂 .

Materials list:

I bought this all off monoprice.com via Amazon, for a total cost of about $400 CDN. I already had the tools and some experience running cable from previous employment. Having the added benefit of living in a bungalow with an undeveloped basement, I only had to traverse one floor with the cabling. But the same steps apply for additional floors and hopefully you have tiled ceiling in the basement if it’s not undeveloped. Otherwise, you’ll need to make holes and patch it up afterwards.

– Cat 6 cable roll
– Cat 6 plugs, boots, RJ45 keystone connectors
– Low-voltage mounting bracket and wall plates
– Patch panel and patch panel hinged wall mount
– Cable tester, Cable stripper, Wire cutters, RJ45 crimper/punch tool
– Drywall saw, stud finder, drywall mud and trowel, drywall sandpaper, vacuum

First, I cut holes in the upstairs drywall adjacent to the coaxial cable outlets, as I know there is existing holes drilled behind these that lead to the basement. I piggy backed on these same holes, and made a couple new ones where I needed room. Hint, if you cut the drywall on a 45 degree angle facing inward to the wall (as opposed to 90 degrees) it makes it easier to set the drywall and mud back over it when you’re done. This allows the piece you cut out to sit back in the hole without falling in or forward.

The cable runs follow the other low-voltage cable (coaxial/RJ11) and terminate near the electrical panel where I’ve added another wood backing. This gave me extra space to mount the patch panels, relocate other cabling, and have an electrician mount additional circuits that are used for the rack.

After running the cable, I used the punchdown tool to place the cable in the back of the patch port as well as at the other end in the keystone connector jack. There’s color coding in both to make it easy, but generally you should use Type B termination everywhere. With cables punched down, I tested the circuits with the cable tester to confirm termination, and confirmed I could grab an IP address from a router and did a bandwidth test.

Next came assembling the used rack found off the local classifieds, racking the gear, and making cable from the patch panel to the rack. Generally tried to keep things as tidy as possible for cabling.

Overall, I spent a couple of weekends completing the project, and currently have 8/24 cable runs populated. This covers my office, living room, and bedroom. Next up is patching in the kitchen, and the ceiling for an AP mount. In the rack I have:

– 2 Dell PowerConnect switches (1x 48 port, 1x 24 port, just the 48 port shown.)
– HP Z800, 2x Intel Xeon X5570, 16 core , 96 GB RAM, 3x 256 GB SSD in RAID0, 2x 2TB HDD in RAID1.
– Triplite 1.5 KW UPS, and APC 1.0 KW UPS.
– Tower PC, 1x Intel i7-2600K, 8 core , 32 GB RAM, 1x 256 GB SSD, 4x 1TB HDD in RAID5.
– HP DL360 G7, 2x Intel Xeon E5640, 24 core, 144 GB RAM, 3x 500 GB SSD in RAID0.

The cable modem and Mikrotik CRS125-24G-1S-2HnD-IN router sit upstairs in my office as they’re silent, and are trunked into the ToR switch. My workstation in the office upstairs is a Tower PC, 1x Intel i7-5930K, 12 core, 64 GB RAM, 1x 256 GB SSD M.2 NVMe, 5x 500 GB SSD in RAID5 with a boat load of screen real estate. 🙂 . The rack gear is all KVM hypervisors hosting a handful of VMs for DNS cache, grafana, monitoring, and a whack of OpenStack reproducing environments from Juno to Ocata.

Calgary OpenStack and other Meetup.com groups

March 21, 2017 By Andrew Ludwar Leave a Comment

I’m a little late on this post, but last week we had an excellent presentation on OpenStack installers. Specifically, TripleO. Chris J from Red Hat gave us a good outline of TripleO’s capabilities, and kept it pretty upstream. For the presentation slide deck, see here. The group tries to keep it as vendor neutral as possible which is nice. There were a lot of questions and feedback, this is probably a topic worth going into in a little more detail, or perhaps doing some hackfest demo’ing!

There’s been quite an uptick in our local OpenStack meetup group lately, it’s been fun to see and get involved with. Both this group, as well as our Red Hat User Group has brought in some high profile and very talented open source folks who’ve presented and shared their knowledge with us.

The OpenStack meetup groups across Canada have come together and created a Slack channel for easier communication and sharing among its members. If you’re interested in joining the channel, drop a comment or send me an email for an invite!

OpenStack deployment troubles? Enter a couple validation tools

October 27, 2016 By Andrew Ludwar Leave a Comment

Whether you’re on your first or hundredth OpenStack deployment, any administrator will tell you that getting the initial deployment configuration correct is crucial. This gets easier with experience, but what can one do in the meantime to supplement that knowledge? Enter two tools: clapper, and the network isolation template generator.

Firstly: the network template generator. If you’ve read through any of the heat templates, or perused some of the upstream docs, you’ll know that configuring the networks you want in your OpenStack environment is a big part of the architecture. It’s also not easy to make changes to that once the environment is deployed. Typically, these configuration parameters are held in the network-environment.yaml template, as well as the nic-configs/<hostname>.yaml templates. To save on confusion and syntax mistakes in manual editing, Ben Nemec has created a GUI tool that creates these templates for you after running through a network creation wizard. With it, you can configure bonding, LACP, VLANs, bridges, etc. all on a per-node basis to satisfy your OpenStack environment needs. Ben publishes a video guide on the tool, as well as a blog on it’s use.

Secondly: clapper. It’s a suite of ansible playbooks that run both prior to and post deployment to validate the configuration of the environment. Within the tool are prepackaged validations (ansible playbooks) submitted by community members to check for things like adequate file descriptors, open file limits, network gateways, disk space, ip ranges, network templates, detecting rogue DHCP servers, and many more. You can git clone this tool to your undercloud server and run validations at any stage of your deployment. It’s handy in helping you implement best practices that come straight from the experience of the OpenStack community.

Got another tool to share? I’d love to hear from you. One that’s been picking up traction lately for ease of cloud deployments is the quickstart cloud installer. When I get some time, I’ll try it out and post a review.