So I received an email this morning from RedHat explaining that RHEL 6 has been announced and with it comes the discontinuation of the RHCT exam which they are replacing with the RHCSA (RedHat Certified Systems Administrator). Fortunately this does not invalidate the RHCT because RedHat feels that the similarities between the two exams are so close that they are converting all existing RHCT’s over to RHCSA’s effective January 1st 2011. Here is the email from RedHat: Red Hat has announced general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Effective with the release of version 6, we will no...

The second OpenStack summit is under way. So far the discussions appear to be very detailed, and have lots of contributors. There was quite a bit of debate around IPv6; As of this writing the Austin release of nova does not currently provide IPv6 support, however the Bexar release should contain “dual stack” which will allow it to support both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. This is a major step moving forward because of the well known IPv4 shortage. The faster we can implement a solid IPv6 solution within OpenStack the better. All in all the summit is going well, and it seems we are going to be...

So I figured I would write this article as a response to some questions and feedback I received from my earlier post “CloudFiles curl example” which outline’s some example usage to interact with the CloudFiles public API as well as some example code. Ryan over at http://www.ryanuber.com/ brought up some interesting questions that I left out in my original post based off of the assumption that the reading audience was already familiar with CloudFiles. Here are two very important and relevant questions that he asked: “What kind of output do you get?” “What kinds of...

I wrote the following script to simplify accessing CloudFiles container’s by utilizing cURL. This example will show you how to list your containers as well as their contents, via the command line without having to login to your control panel. This can also be a useful example to provide you with a sample code base to implement within your own infrastructure. CloudFiles uses a a “ReST” API which allow’s you to interact with it in a variety of ways by using curl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. This particular script was written in bash so that I could utilize it from a shell, however the...

While there are plenty of URL monitor’s available to verify if your site is working or not, many of them cost money. I was recently debugging a monitoring issue and found that I needed a simple URL monitor which would return the HTTP response code only, and provide some basic logging as well so that I wouldn’t have to sift through two day’s worth of shell output. Long story short this was a temporary solution and not one that I had any desire to spend money on so I threw together the following script. I wrote it in ruby because I like its logger library which gives enough options and...