Don's Blog

Wooden boards

A few pics of some roughly milled Ash planks a friend gave us, which I planed/thicknessed and cut to length & height to create kitchen kick-boards.

Followed by a few pics of a chopping board I finished off at the same time.

The planks had been sitting around the yard for quite a while… here they are after a quick initial run through the planer:

Close up after sanding and applying a load of Danish oil:

Drying in the sun:

The boards are in place now and I’ll add some pics if the kitchen is ever clean enough 🙂

Some close up pics of a couple of chopping board made from a sleeper another friend gave me about 5 years ago – he’d had it for yonks so it must be pretty old wood. I left them extra chunky so when they get too scored and cut I can resurface them several times:

Beech House

Some pics of a (mostly) beech bird feeding house I made a while back – the first pic shows one of many visits from the local Woodpeckers captured on my CCTV camera.

young woodpecker

New Meetup – Vagrant from scratch to LAMP stack

Automated IT Solutions are running a new Meetup in Edinburgh on Friday 18th May, check out the details and register for this free session here – beer, pizza and free HashiCorp stickers included!:

Vagrant from scratch to LAMP stack

Friday, May 18, 2018, 6:15 PM

HAYS
7 Castle St, Edinburgh EH2 3AH Edinburgh, GB

18 Members Attending

Automated IT Solutions are presenting a session on HashiCorp Vagrant: “from scratch to LAMP stack” by Adam Cheney. In this session you will learn: – Vagrant basics, introduction and usage – How to install and configure Vagrant – Provisioning VMs with Vagrant and Ansible followed by a live demonstration/workshop of building a LAMP stack within Vagra…

Check out this Meetup →

Spalted Beech bowl – green woodturning

The weather’s finally warm enough for me to do some woodturning again.

I’ve been wanting to make some more “green” Beech bowls from the trees I chopped up early last year. Here are pics of the process.

chainsawed a “50p” shaped bowl blank from a slab of wood that’s been sitting in the shed:

quickly and easily made round – green wood cuts very easily, and smells good too!

spinning at about 2,000 rpm:really nice spalting all the way through: some homemade beeswax and oil applied, with help from a bit of heat: inside done too… and the underneath finished in the reversing jaws: all done – will try and let it finish drying out slowly to avoid serious cracking, but it’s bound to warp a fair bit…

Snowtastic

Adding an insecure-registry to Docker on Ubuntu

Quick note on adding an entry like –insecure-registry 172.30.0.0/16 to docker running on Ubuntu.

While trying to get oc cluster up working on an Ubuntu VM I was getting the following error message and (helpfully) a suggested solution:

don@ubuntu:~# oc cluster up doncluster
Starting OpenShift using registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/ose:v3.7.23 ...
-- Checking OpenShift client ... OK
-- Checking Docker client ... OK
-- Checking Docker version ... OK
-- Checking for existing OpenShift container ... OK
-- Checking for registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/ose:v3.7.23 image ... OK
-- Checking Docker daemon configuration ... FAIL
   Error: did not detect an --insecure-registry argument on the Docker daemon
   Solution:
     Ensure that the Docker daemon is running with the following argument:
         --insecure-registry 172.30.0.0/16

I normally work on RedHat boxes, and this is usually easily solved by going to /etc/sysconfig/docker and adding the desired registry to the line:

INSECURE_REGISTRY=

On more recent RedHat docker installs this is now done in the externalised config file /etc/containers/registries.conf.

On my Ubuntu VM neither of these exist, and running locate with grep plus a quick google brings back loads of other file locations and suggestions, none of which worked for me (/etc/default/docker, exporting DOCKER_OPTS etc etc).

So, I checked systemctl status docker and got the following:

don@ubuntu:~# systemctl status docker
● docker.service - Docker Application Container Engine
 Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/docker.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
 Active: active (running) since Wed 2018-01-24 11:29:25 GMT; 25min ago
 Docs: https://docs.docker.com
 Main PID: 4648 (dockerd)
 Tasks: 19 (limit: 19660)
 Memory: 26.8M
 CPU: 1.324s
 CGroup: /system.slice/docker.service
 ├─4648 /usr/bin/dockerd -H fd:// --insecure-registry 172.30.0.0/16
 └─4667 docker-containerd -l unix:///var/run/docker/libcontainerd/docker-containerd.sock --shim docker-containerd-shim --metrics-interval=0 --start-timeout 2m --state-di (...snip)

which prompted me to look at the file

/lib/systemd/system/docker.service

Adding the settings I wanted to the end of the ExecStart line like so:

ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd -H fd:// --insecure-registry 172.30.0.0/16

followed by a

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart docker

did the trick, finally.

I am now hitting this issue, which looks like a systemd + docker mismatch… and am thinking CentOS may be a better place to test this!

don@ubuntu:~# oc cluster up doncluster
Starting OpenShift using registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/ose:v3.7.23 ...
-- Checking OpenShift client ... OK
-- Checking Docker client ... OK
-- Checking Docker version ... OK
-- Checking for existing OpenShift container ... OK
-- Checking for registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/ose:v3.7.23 image ... OK
-- Checking Docker daemon configuration ... OK
-- Checking for available ports ... FAIL
   Error: Cannot get TCP port information from Kubernetes host
   Caused By:
     Error: cannot start container cec56a101a46aa25adb6806f7c84df218e5d79c392fa0c38207f92510eb46538
     Caused By:
       Error: Error response from daemon: {"message":"oci runtime error: rootfs_linux.go:53: mounting \"/sys/fs/cgroup\" to rootfs \"/var/lib/docker/aufs/mnt/aeedaa83596edc9cb2b2cd835000277f9a5355f709694f8ec70d88787395cbd0\" caused \"no subsystem for mount\""}

argh.

Getting started with Terraform and AWS

These are my notes from running through the Terraform getting started guide here:

https://www.terraform.io/intro/getting-started/install.html

to set up terraform (on a Mac) and provision a basic test instance in AWS.

Install process

This is very easy, simply download terraform for your platform (a single binary), extract it somewhere sensible and add that location to your PATH variable.

I set this up in my .profile, along the lines of:

export TFORM=/Users/donaldsimpson/TFORM
export PATH=$M2:$TFORM:$PATH

quick check that all looks ok:

Setup

As per the guide, the next steps are to get a note of your AWS access_key and secret_key from this AWS page, then create and edit a local “example.tf” file for your project, like this:

provider "aws" {
  access_key = "ACCESS_KEY_HERE"
  secret_key = "SECRET_KEY_HERE"
  region     = "us-east-1"
}

resource "aws_instance" "example" {
  ami           = "ami-2757f631"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
}

I hit this issue: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/4367 as my AWS account is pretty old, and had to change the values for

ami = "ami-2757f631"instance_type = "t2.micro"

to be:

ami = "ami-408c7f28" instance_type = "t1.micro"

Terraform init

You should now be able to run terraform init and see something positive…

Check the plan

Running “terraform plan” provides a dry run/sanity check of what would be done

Make it so

terraform apply: run the plan, and actually create the resources listed above:

Show it is so

Once that has completed, you can check your AWS console and see the newly created instance:

“terraform show” can confirm the same details in a less pointy-clickety way:

Next steps

This was all pretty simple, quick and straightforward.

The next steps are to manage the hosts in an Infrastructure as Code manner, adding in changes and deletions/reprovisioning, and to do something useful with them.

I’d also like to try using Terraform with Digital Ocean and VMWare providers.