Rackspace

I spent too much time trying to figure out how to use the latest swiftclient/novaclient with Rackspace Cloud that I thought I would have to document it somewhere to avoid the pain for others. Assuming you don’t want to use pyrax and no OS_AUTH_SYSTEM plugin but just pure OpenStack python-novaclient/swiftclient on Rackspace cloud then you just need to export those variables in your shell : export OS_REGION_NAME=ORD export OS_USERNAME=username export OS_TENANT_NAME=" " export OS_PASSWORD=password export OS_AUTH_URL=https://identity.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2.0/ so now the region is ORD here (Chicago) but this can be SYD/IAD/DFW or whatever new datacenter/region from Rackspace. If you wanted to use the UK region you would need another username/password which is tighted to the LON datacenter (yes that’s an another legacy weirdness). ...

After almost five years at Rackspace UK I have now decided to move on and come back for good to Paris I will be now at eNovance working as before on OpenStack projects.

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 !important;"> disable the firewall </p> <p> </span></li> <li> <span style="font-size: medium;"> <p style="display: inline !important;"> allow or disallow a port or a network </p> <p> </span></li> <li> <span style="font-size: medium;"> <p style="display: inline !important;"> see firewall status </p> <p> </span></li> </ul> <h3> PREREQUISITES </h3> <ul> <li> <span style="font-size: medium;"> <p style="display: inline !important;"> A management server under Ubuntu maverick. </p> <p> </span></li> <li> <span style="font-size: medium;"> <p style="display: inline !important;"> A supported Operating System for clients which includes : </p> <p> </span></li> <li> <span style="font-size: medium;"> <p style="display: inline !important;"> Debian. </p> <p> </span></li> <li> <span style="font-size: medium;"> <p style="display: inline !important;"> Ubuntu. </p> <p> </span></li> <li> <span style="font-size: medium;"> <p style="display: inline !important;"> RHEL. </p> <p> </span></li> <li> <span style="font-size: medium;"> <p style="display: inline !important;"> Fedora </p> <p> </span></li> <li> <span style="font-size: medium;"> <p style="display: inline !important;"> My patched python-cloudservers library (see below for installs). </p> <p> </span></li> <li> <span style="font-size: medium;"> <p style="display: inline !important;"> Your SSH key installed on all VM for root users. </p> <p> </span></li> </ul> <h3> Install </h3> <ul> <li> <span style="font-size: medium;"> <p style="display: inline !important;"> After you have kicked a VM with a Ubuntu maverick and connected to it as root you want first execute intall some prereq packages : </p> <p> </span></li> </ul> apt-get update && apt-get -y install python-stdeb git <p> checkout my python-cloudservers library : </p> git clone git://github.com/chmouel/python-cloudservers.git <p> after being checked-out you will go into the python-cloudservers directory which has just been created and do this : </p> cd python-cloudservers/ python setup.py install <p> this should automatically install all the dependences. </p> <p> Now you can install my api-demo which include the firewall script : </p> cd ../ git clone git://github.com/chmouel/cloudservers-api-demo <p> You need to configure some environemnt variable first which keep information about your rackspace account. </p> <p> edit your ~/.bashrc (or /etc/environement if you want to make it global) and configure those variable : </p> export RCLOUD_DATACENTER=UK export UK_RCLOUD_USER="MY_USERNAME" export UK_RCLOUD_KEY="MY_API_KEY" export UK_RCLOUD_AURL="https://lon.auth.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0" <p> or for the US you would have : </p> export RCLOUD_DATACENTER=US export UK_RCLOUD_USER="MY_USERNAME" export UK_RCLOUD_KEY="MY_API_KEY" export UK_RCLOUD_AURL="https://auth.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0" <p> source the ~/.bashrc or relog into your account to have those accounts set-up you can test it to see if that works by going to : </p> ~/cloudservers-api-demo/python <p> and launch the command : </p> ./list-servers.py <p> to test if this is working properly (it should list your servers for your DATACENTER) </p> <p> you are now basically ready to mass update firewall on all servers. </p> <p> Let's say you have two web servers named web1 and web2 and two db servers named db1 and db2 and you would like to allow the 80 port on the web servers and 3306 port on the db servers. </p> <p> You would have to go to this directory : </p> ~/cloudservers-api-demo/firewall/ <p> and first execute this command to see the help/usages : </p> ./fw-control.py --help <p> so let's say to enable the firewall on all the web and db server first you can do : </p> ./fw-control.py -s "web db" enable <p> it will connect and enable the firewall on all the servers which match the name web and db. </p> <p> now let's say we want to enable port 80 on the web : </p> ./fw-control.py -s "web" allow port 80 <p> if you log into the servers you can check with </p> iptables -L -n <p> that it it has been enabled properly. </p> <p> This is simple enough for you to modify the script to your liking to make it more modular for your specific environement. </p>

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. ...

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(); ?>

It seems that my post about using duplicity to backup your data on Rackspace CloudFiles got popular and people may be interested to use with the newly (Beta) released Rackspace Cloud UK. You would just need to have a environnement exported at the top of your backup script like this : export CLOUDFILES_AUTHURL=https://lon.auth.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0 and it will use the UK auth server (the same goes for OpenStack auth server if you have your own Swift install). ...

If you are wondering howto use a graphical client like Cyberduck to access the Rackspace Cloud UK this is how you do it. We are going to use the Swift OpenStack support in Cyberduck to access the UK CloudFiles instance. You first Open Cyberduck and Click on open connection : In the Menu choose Swift (OpenStack Object Storage) and in Server field you specify : lon.auth.api.rackspacecloud.com and enter your Username and Api Key (in Password field) : ...