Natural Born Coder

Year: 2014

  • Installing Linux on a PowerEdge 860

    —

    by

    doozer
    in ,

    I’ve got a couple of old Dell PowerEdge 860 servers. They are nothing to write home about but they are functional and good enough for playing around with (I’m investigating KVM and Xen virtualization at the moment). What I need to do though is install from a USB as I don’t have any CD’s to…

  • Installing and Running KVM on Ubuntu 14.04 Part 1

    —

    by

    doozer
    in ,

    I’ve been running my own servers for many years now but recently I’ve started to get the feeling that I could be doing a better job of it. I’ve played with virutalization a little both on the desktop and on real servers (I run a small VMware set up for work) but I’ve never translated that…

  • Understanding TUN TAP Interfaces

    —

    by

    doozer
    in , ,

    As I mentioned in the previous article Understanding Bridges, Linux and most other operating systems have the ability to create virtual interfaces which are usually called TUN/TAP devices. This article will discuss those devices with particular focus on how they are used in OpenStack.

  • Understanding Bridges

    —

    by

    doozer
    in , ,

    In this article I’ll discuss network bridges and where they are commonly used (spoiler: they aren’t any more). Mainly though I want to discuss how bridges are used in an OpenStack set up as building a personal cloud is my final aim. Hardware network bridges aren’t as common as they once were as switches have…

  • Understanding VLANs

    —

    by

    doozer
    in , ,

    The aim of this article is to explain VLANs to someone who has a reasonable understand of how a computer network works. Recently I’ve been reading up on OpenStack as I’d like to put together a small personal cloud for a project I’m working on. So far so easy but the one aspect that I’ve been…

  • WobblyStack – Reading List

    —

    by

    doozer
    in ,

    I had to read a lot before I could get to the point where I felt I could write a script that installed OpenStack for me. The links below are a selection of articles that I found useful. This is the complete list of things I read as I didn’t start compiling the list before…

  • A Quick Introduction to Open vSwitch

    —

    by

    doozer
    in , ,

    In a previous article I discussed bridges and showed how the Linux utilities bridge-utils and iproute2 could be used to create virtual bridges within a system. This is great for simple set up but when deploying a cloud environment a bit more functionality is required and that’s where Open vSwitch comes in.

  • Installing VirtualBox Additons on Ubuntu Server

    —

    by

    doozer
    in ,

    I have a number of Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machines installed under VirtualBox running on Windows 8.1 and occasionally I find it useful to have the VirtualBox additions installed. Unfortunately for me the documented process doesn’t seem to work. Whenever I mount the ISO image using Devices –> Insert Guest Additions CD Image… I find that…

  • WatchedFlix

    —

    by

    doozer
    in

    WatchedFlix home page coming soon…

  • Udacity Computer Networking Course Notes

    —

    by

    doozer
    in ,

    I’ve just started the Udacity course on Computer Networking and I’ve hit a few bumps along the way so I thought I’d document them here for others to find.

  • Mininet Waiting for Network Configuration

    —

    by

    doozer
    in ,

    I recently started taking the Udacity course on Computer Networking and while it looks like a good course it suffers from the same problem all the Udacity courses seem to suffer from: really badly put together examples and quizzes. It’s a shame because the material itself is generally of a really high quality. The problem I…

  • Using PuTTY for Key-Based SSH Login

    —

    by

    doozer
    in

    If you are on Windows and need to “shell” into a Linux machine then PuTTY is the tool of choice. For password based logins it’s as simple as entering the IP address or name of the machine you want to connect to but for key based logins things get a little more complicated. This guide…