Tech Radar blog
Viewing entries posted in 2011
High tech start-ups in Alberta, there is support for you! (Here’s where to look…)
Calgary was recently applauded for having the most entrepreneurs per capita in Canada. And certainly, there appears to be no shortage of investors in this town looking to support new ventures. At least, this is what I witnessed at two very well-attended Innovate Calgary events during the past week: the 12th Annual Tech Showcase & Open House on October 27, and the first session of Innovate Calgaryís Speaker Series, So You Want To Be a Tech Entrepreneur?, held at the University of Calgary on November 1.
Putting OpenStack into Production — Part 3: Load Balancing and HTTPS
We’ve found the OpenStack Compute (nova) processes to be very reliable and stable. I can’t think of a time when we’ve had to restart the nova processes due to them becoming “wedged” or crashing.
Greening Cybera’s server room
Here at Cybera, despite being so busy lately, we’ve also recently completed an infrastructure greening initiative, albeit inadvertently…
11 Questions with Mogens Smed
This month’s 11 Questions interview is with Mogens Smed, CEO of DIRTT (Doing It Right This Time) Environmental Solutions…
Things are Opening up
The OpenStack Essex Design Summit and Conference was held in Boston in early October, 2011. On my first day at the design summit, I learned about a new tool to setup a full OpenStack development environment, known as devstack.
Using OpenStack with IPv6
Lately, we’ve attempted to deploy OpenStack (Cactus) in IPv6 dual stack mode using the instructions from Configuring Compute to use IPv6 Addresses. Those instructions detail what to do to get virtual machines (VMs) with IPv6 addresses, but don’t go into what to do once you have them! There isn’t a lot of material on the Internet about using OpenStack with IPv6 so, with the help of our excellent Network Operations team, we dug our heels in and went to work.
In the end we had some success with getting OpenStack to work with IPv6 in our sandbox environment. We were able to ping6 and ssh -6 to a VM across the Calgary Cybera network, meaning that we were able to access VMs via IPv6 from nodes other than those immediately in our OpenStack deployment. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to test access via IPv6 across the Internet.
On the network operations side of things here’s what we had to do:
Below is a simple diagram showing how we setup OpenStack to use IPv6.
The FD00::/8 address is private, not routable on the Internet (like 10.0.0.0 or 192.168.0.0 for IPv4). We are simply using it as an example in this diagram. Ideally we would want to use a public IPv6 address when we setup a real OpenStack environment.
For example, Cybera’s range could be 2001:410:6080:80::/64 for the “outside” OpenStack network and 2001:410:6080:90::/64 for the “inside” OpenStack network.
Using OpenStack with IPv6
Lately, we’ve attempted to deploy OpenStack in IPv6 dual stack mode using the instructions from Configuring Compute. Those instructions detail what to do to get virtual machines with IPv6 addresses, but don’t go into what to do once you have them!
U of A Computing Science Wows ITAC Visitors
Mike MacGregor, Professor and Chair, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, describes the Information Technology Association of Canada board meeting held on September 21st…
Open source is great! Now how can we make money off of it?
Open source, and in particular open geographic information systems (GIS), is at the heart of the Water and Environmental Hub. So it seemed highly appropriate that I should take a break from the GIS In the Rockies conference in Denver, CO, to check out the nearby Free and Open Source Software for GIS (FOSS4G) event, which ran from Sept. 12-16…
From Rails to Grails: Dependency Management
Every Grails project has a /lib folder and any .jar files placed in this folder will be added to the classpath of the application. So why use Grails’ dependency management capability? Here are a few reasons…