I have started to update all my servers to the latest LTS of Ubuntu, mainly because I don't want to stick with the old Centos7 I installed when I was setting up Ambari. Since that is not happening, it was time to move to something more current. Enter Ubuntu 20.04.
However, it was not to be so simple. The whole process started with me needing to fix some bad sectors on Station01. I spotted some issues when I was downloading the astronomy files. However, they did not seem to be trouble, so I let it go. Eventually, it became a drastically different situation, and the drive would not boot. That was likely due to a bad SATA drive controller. Bought new motherboard and CPU, which was a great thing, plus a new drive. I managed to backup the volume with the astronomy files to the Host01 via NFS.
After the new Ubuntu install, and moving the files back, lo and behold, more errors. This time, it was a drive not ready problem on the new drive. Panicked, I shut it down and did some digging into what could be causing the issue. I ended up replacing the drive cable, and bingo, no problem after that.
I got Grafana installed for dashboarding stuff, and Duplicati for backups. Two services I desperately needed.
Once I had things back in shape, I decided to break things again.
Attempted to install Cloudstack on Ubuntu 20.04, for the better part of a week. Finally gave up. I am not going all the way back to Centos7 for something that important. Admittedly, the insructions are pretty straightforward, with only a few Red Hat quirks that were easily translated to Ubuntu. But realistically, trying to get the Management server to see the virtualization agent was impossible. With everything in Java, it was like troubleshooting in the bogs. Instead, I have decided to do OpenStack as the replacement.
I am reading a good intro for administrators and network service architects, so I am already in a better shape to get it setup the right way out of the gate. The best part is that it is not really an all or nothing system, unlike Cloudstack. OpenStack is broken up into layered pieces, so it may be easier to manage the many components because each one is exposed and has their own configs and daemons. Anyway, I will see how this goes, and watch for how scalable and flexible the services can actually be. I do want to play with containers, but mainly it is about virtual machines.
Winston had a birthday today, and we had a nice visit with Tony and Steve. Then, Sam brought Winston a birthday gift from Coco, which was totally sweet. He brought a couple of plush toys that we will instagram tomorrow.
While my project with Royal has been completely bonkers with changes, I am finding it oddly satisfying to be on a track to accomplish something quite complex and completely new for the IT PM team. Not only did the ship relocate from Singapore to the US, but the TVs from Singapore will end up being shipped anyway without catching a ride onboard.