Running 1,266 km (786 miles): Cycling 3865 km (2401 miles): Let’s see if I can improve for next year

[NB: Much things has changed since I have written this article but keeping it here for info] It seems that integrating Swift and Keystone together present some challenges to people and this is absolutely normal as there is a lot of changes going on. This is my attempt to document how everything is plugged together. I am not going to explain how a middleware is supposed to work as this is nicely documented on Wikipedia :...

I have done lately quite a bit of work with python-novaclient the (nova/keystone) openstack client. I often experiment it with ipython in the console. There is a nice debugging facility in novaclient which you can see while using –debug argument on the command line and if you wanted to use it with ipython you could have that at the beginning of your session : This would give you the details of the session showing you the REST requests and responses including the headers....

I have released a python binding to Rackspace CloudDNS here which allow you to create/update/delete domains and records. It’s available on github https://github.com/rackspace/python-clouddns/ The binding is pretty simple and have unfortunately no documentation (or even tests) but you can figure out most of it from here : https://github.com/rackspace/python-clouddns/blob/master/tests/t.py I will be very welcoming pull request that add a bit of documentation.

A lot of our customers in Rackspace cloud has been asking how to mass edit firewalls of servers when you have multiple servers without doing it manually. Part of my cloudservers-api-demo I have written a simple firewall scripts abstracting the Operating System firewall software to allow/enable/disable the firewall and ports/networks. The script has been kept very simple by design and currently allow only to : <p style="display: inline !important;"> enable the firewall </p> <p> </span></li> <li> <span style="font-size: medium;"> <p style="display: inline !...

Currently in Rackspace-Cloud when you are shutting-down your Cloud Servers you are still paying for it. The reason is that when the Cloud Server is shut-down your CloudServer is still sitting on the hyper-visor and still use resources on the Cloud and then get you billed for it. There is a way to get around it by having the CloudServer stored as an image into CloudFiles. The caveat with this solution is that every-time you are creating a server out of the stored image you are getting a new IP and in certain cases you would need to make a change in your application with the new IP....

Sometime ago I wrote a FTP proxy to RackSpace Cloud Files which expose Rackspace Cloud Files as a FTP server acting as a proxy. Thanks to the OpenSource community a user on github took it and add support OpenStack and all the latest features available in Cloud Files. It is now pretty robust and works pretty well via nautilus even with the pseudo hierarchical folder feature. The fun part here is that it allow you to effectively have a Cloud Drive where you can easily store your files/backup from your Linux desktop via nautilus built-in ftp support....

I have just uploaded python-cloudfiles to pypi available here This make things easy to add as a dependence of your project like you can have something like this in your setup.py : requirements = ['python-cloudfiles'] and it will automatically download it as part of the dependence with easy_install or pip. cool kids on latest debian/ubuntu can do stuff like this (from python-stdeb package) : pypi-install python-cloudfiles which would automatically download the tarball from pypi and install it as a packages (like the way it should be for prod machine!...

Fireuploader is a Firefox addon that gives you a nice GUI to upload files via your firefox browser. I have made a special version of the extensions to make it works with the RackSpace Cloud UK. Install the addon from here : http://www.chmouel.com/pub/firefox_universal_uploader__fireuploader_-0.4.5-fx+mz+ukcf.xpi Allow the website by clicking Allow in the yellow bar on the top as seen in this screenshot : Click on Install Now and restart Firefox. After the Firefox browser is restarted you can go in Tools => Fireuploader and choose Rackspace Cloud UK in the dropdown list :...

One of the last library I didn’t documented in my earlier post was php-cloudfiles. You need to have at least the version 1.7.6 released to have support to different auth_server and when you have that you can do it like this to get access to cloud files via the library : <?php require_once("cloudfiles.php"); # Allow override by environment variable $USER = "MY_API_USERNAME"; $API_KEY = "MY_API_KEY"; $auth = new CF_Authentication($USER, $API_KEY, NULL, UK_AUTHURL); $auth->authenticate(); ?...