Howto use centos cloud images with cloud-init on KVM/libvirtd

March 3, 2019 6 minute read

Images versus unattended setup

Old-school

Unattended setup

In a traditional environment, systems are installed from a CDROM. The configuration is executed by the system administrator through the installer. This soon becomes a borning and unpractical task when we need to set up a lot of systems also it is important that systems are configured in same - and hopefully correct - way.

In a traditional environment, this can be automated by booting via BOOTP/PXE boot and configured is by a system that “feeds” the installer. Examples are:

[Solaris Jumpstart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JumpStart_(Solaris)
Redhat Kickstart
DebianInstaller Preseed
Suse Autoyast
…

How to install libreboot on a ThinkPad W500

February 10, 2019 12 minute read

I got a Lenovo Thinkpad W500 from www.2dehands.be for a nice price.

Actually, I got it a couple of months back but I didn’t have time to play with it and it took some time to get some parts from Aliexpress.

The Thinkpad W500 is probably the most powerful system that is compatible with Libreboot, it has a nice high-resolution display with a 1920 x 1200 resolution which is even a higher screen resolution than the Full HD resolution used on most new laptops today.

Security

Keep in mind that the core duo CPU does not get microcode updates from Intel for [spectre and meltdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability). There is no solution (currently) for spectre 3a - Rogue System Register Read - CVE-2018-3640 and Spectre 4 - Speculative Store Bypass CVE-2018-3639 without a microcode update.

Binary blobs are bad. Having a closed source binary-only piece of software on your system is not only unacceptable for Free Software activists it also makes it more difficult to review what it really does and makes it more difficult to review it for security concerns.

Having your system vulnerable is also a bad thing of course. Can’t wait to get a computer system with an open CPU architecture like RISC-V.

Preparation

Setting up OpenStack-Ansible All-In-One on a Centos 7 system

January 21, 2019 6 minute read

Openstack is a nice platform to deploy an Infrastructure as a service and is a collection of projects but it can be a bit difficult to setup. The documentation is really great if you want to setup openstack by hand and there are a few openstack distributions that makes it easier to install it.

Ansible is a very nice tool for system automatisation and is one that’s easier to learn.

Wouldn’t be nice if we could make the openstack installation easier with ansible? That’s exactly what Openstack-Ansible does.

In this blog post we’ll setup “an all-in-one” openstack installation on Centos 7. The installer will install openstack into lxc containers and it’s nice way to learn how openstack works and how to operate it.