Picture of a comms rack with a patch panel, a unifi USW-Pro-24 switch, two Dell Optiplex 3040M computers, two external hard drives and a Raspberry Pi.

Building a Highly Available (HA) two-node Home Lab on Proxmox

Warning, this is a long and dense document!

That said, If you’re thinking of getting started with Proxmox though it’s well worth a read. If you’ve *used* Proxmox, and think I’m doing something wrong here, let me know in the comments!

Context

In the various podcasts I listen to, I’ve been hearing over and over again about Proxmox, and how it’s a great system for building and running virtual machines. In a former life, I’d use a combination of VMWare ESXi servers or desktop machines running Vagrant and Virtualbox to build out small labs and build environments, and at home I’d previously used a i3 ex-demo machine that was resold to staff at a reduced price. Unfortunately, the power supply went pop one evening on that, and all my home-lab experiments died.

When I changed to my most recent job, I had a small cash windfall at the same time, and decided to rebuild my home lab. I bought two Dell Optiplex 3040M i5 with 16GB RAM and two 3TB external USB3 hard drives to provide storage. These were selected because of the small size which meant they would fit in the small comms rack I had fitted when I got my house wired with CAT6 networking cables last year. These were patched into the UniFi USW-Pro-24 which was fitted as part of the networking build.

Picture of a comms rack with a patch panel, a unifi USW-Pro-24 switch, two Dell Optiplex 3040M computers, two external hard drives and a Raspberry Pi.

(Yes, it’s a bit of a mess, but it’s also not been in there very long, so needs a bit of a clean-up!)

The Install

I allocated two static IP addresses for these hosts, and performed a standard installation of Proxmox using a USB stick with the multi-image-installer Ventoy on it.

Some screenshots follow:

Proxmox installation screen showing the EULA
Proxmox installation screen showing the installation target
Proxmox installation screen showing the location and timezone settings
Proxmox installation screen showing the prompt for credentials and contact email address
Proxmox installation screen showing the IP address and hostname selection screen

Note that these screenshots were built on one pass, and have been rebuilt with new IPs that are used later.

Proxmox installation screen showing the summary of all the options selected
Proxmox installation screen showing the actual installation details and an advert for why you should use it.
Proxmox installation screen showing the success screen

As I don’t have an enterprise subscription, I ran these commands to use tteck’s Post PVE Install script to change the repositories.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tteck/Proxmox/main/misc/post-pve-install.sh
# Run the following to confirm the download looks OK and non-corrupted
less post-pve-install.sh
bash post-pve-install.sh

This results in the following (time-lapse) output, which is a series of options asking you to approve making changes to the system.

A time-lapse video of what happens during the post-pve-install script.

[Most of the following are derived from this YouTube video: “1/2 Create a 2-node Proxmox VE Cluster. Gluster as shared storage. With High Availability! First ep”]

Clustering

After signing into both Proxmox nodes, I went to my first node (proxmox01), selected “Datacenter” and then “Cluster”.

An image of the Proxmox server selecting the cluster screen

I clicked on “Create Cluster”, and created a cluster, called (unimaginatively) proxmox-cluster.

The create cluster dialogue box
The task completion details for the create cluster action

I clicked “Join Information”.

A screenshot showing the "Join information" button
The join information dialogue box

Next, on proxmox02 on the same screen, I clicked on “Join Cluster” and then pasted that information into the dialogue box. I entered the root password, and clicked “Join ‘proxmox-cluster'”.

A screenshot of the proxmox cluster, showing where the "join cluster" button is.
The Cluster Join screen, showing the pasted in text from the other cluster and that the password has been entered.

When this finished running, if either screen has hung, check whether one of the screens is showing an error like permission denied - invalid PVE ticket (401), like this (hidden just behind the “Task Viewer: Join Cluster” dialogue box):

A screen shot showing the error message "permission denied - invalid PVE ticket"

Or /etc/pve/nodes/NODENAME/pve-ssl.pem' does not exist! (500):

A screen shot of the error message "pve-ssl.pem does not exist"

Refresh your browsers, and you’ll probably find that the joining node will present a new TLS certificate:

A screen shot of Firefox's "unknown certificate" screen

Accept the certificate to resume the process.

To ensure I had HA quorum, which requires three nodes, I added an unused Raspberry Pi 3 running Raspberry Pi OS.

With that, I enabled root SSH access:

echo "PermitRootLogin yes" | tee /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/root_login.conf >/dev/null && systemctl restart ssh.service

Next, I setup a password for the root account:

sudo passwd

And I installed the package “corosync-qnetd” on it:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y corosync-qnetd

Back on both of the Proxmox nodes, I installed the package “corosync-qdevice”:

apt update && apt install -y corosync-qdevice
A screen shot of the installation of the corosync-qdevice package having completed

On proxmox01 I then ran pvecm qdevice setup 192.168.1.179(where 192.168.1.179 is the IP address of the Raspberry Pi device).

A screen shot of the first half of of the setup of the command pvecm qdevice setup
A screen shot of the second half of of the setup of the command pvecm qdevice setup

This gave me my quorum of 3 nodes. To confirm this, I ran pvecm statuswhich resulted in this output:

root@proxmox01:~# pvecm status
Cluster information
-------------------
Name:             proxmox-cluster
Config Version:   3
Transport:        knet
Secure auth:      on

Quorum information
------------------
Date:             Tue May 16 20:38:15 2023
Quorum provider:  corosync_votequorum
Nodes:            2
Node ID:          0x00000001
Ring ID:          1.9
Quorate:          Yes

Votequorum information
----------------------
Expected votes:   3
Highest expected: 3
Total votes:      3
Quorum:           2  
Flags:            Quorate Qdevice 

Membership information
----------------------
    Nodeid      Votes    Qdevice Name
0x00000001          1    A,V,NMW 192.168.1.200 (local)
0x00000002          1    A,V,NMW 192.168.1.201
0x00000000          1            Qdevice
root@proxmox01:~#
A screen shot of the output from the pvecm status command.

Storage

ZFS

Once the machines were built, I went into the Disks screen on each node, found the 3TB drive and selected “Wipe Disk”.

A screenshot of the disks page, showing the location of the "wipe disk" button.
A confirmation screen shot asking if I want to format the disk.
The completion screen shot for the wipe disk action

Next I clicked “Initialize Disk with GPT”.

The disk screen showing the location of the "Initialize Disk with GPT" button
The completion screenshot for initializing the disk

Next I went into the ZFS page in the node and created a ZFS Single Disk pool.

The ZFS screen shot, showing the location of the "Create: ZFS" button.

This pool was named “zfs-proxmox##” where “##” was replaced by the node number (so zfs-proxmox01 and zfs-proxmox02).

A screen shot of the options for creating the ZFS pool.

This mounts the pool as the pool name in the root (so /zfs-proxmox01 and /zfs-proxmox02).

A screen shot confirming that the disks have been mounted

GlusterFS

I added the Gluster debian repository by downloading the key from https://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/10/rsa.pub and placing it in /etc/apt/keyrings/gluster.asc.

mkdir /etc/apt/keyrings
cd /etc/apt/keyrings
wget https://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/10/rsa.pub
mv rsa.pub gluster.asc
A screen shot showing that the gluster key has been added to the system

Next I created a new repository entry in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gluster.listwhich contained the line:

deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/gluster.asc] https://download.gluster.org/pub/gluster/glusterfs/10/LATEST/Debian/bullseye/amd64/apt bullseye main
A screenshot showing the apt repository being added to the system

I next ran apt update && apt install -y glusterfs-serverwhich installed the Gluster service.

A screen shot showing the installation of glusterfs-server in progress
A screenshot showing the completion of the glusterfs-server package and it's dependencies having been installed.

Following the YouTube link above, I created an entry for gluster01 and gluster02 in /etc/hosts which pointed to the IP address of proxmox01 and proxmox02 respectively.

A screen shot of editing the hosts file

Next, I edited /etc/glusterfs/glusterd.volso it contained this content:

volume management
    type mgmt/glusterd
    option working-directory /var/lib/glusterd
    option transport-type socket
    option transport.socket.keepalive-time 10
    option transport.socket.keepalive-interval 2
    option transport.socket.read-fail-log off
    option transport.socket.listen-port 24007
    option transport.rdma.bind-address gluster01
    option transport.socket.bind-address gluster01
    option transport.tcp.bind-address gluster01
    option ping-timeout 0
    option event-threads 1
#   option lock-timer 180
#   option transport.address-family inet6
#   option base-port 49152
    option max-port  60999
end-volume
A screen shot of editing the glusterd.vol file.

Note that this content above is for proxmox01. For proxmox02 I replaced “gluster01” with “gluster02”. I then ran systemctl enable --now glusterdwhich started the Gluster service.

Once this is done, you must run gluster probe gluster02from proxmox01 (or vice versa), otherwise, when you run the next command, you get this message:

volume create: gluster-volume: failed: Host gluster02 is not in 'Peer in Cluster' state
A screen shot of the error message issued when you've not run gluster probe before creating the volume

(This takes some backing out… ugh)

On proxmox01, I created the volume using this command:

gluster volume create gluster-volume replica 2 gluster01:/zfs-proxmox01/gluster-volume gluster02:/zfs-proxmox02/gluster-volume
A screen shot of creating the gluster volume.

As you can see in the above screenshot, this warned about split brain situations. However, as this is for my home lab, I accepted the risk here. Following the YouTube video again, I ran these commands to “avoid [a] split-brain situation”:

gluster volume start gluster-volume
gluster volume set gluster-volume cluster.heal-timeout 5
gluster volume heal gluster-volume enable
gluster volume set gluster-volume cluster.quorum-reads false
gluster volume set gluster-volume cluster.quorum-count 1
gluster volume set gluster-volume network.ping-timeout 2
gluster volume set gluster-volume cluster.favorite-child-policy mtime
gluster volume heal gluster-volume granular-entry-heal enable
gluster volume set gluster-volume cluster.data-self-heal-algorithm full
A screenshot of the output of all the commands issued to prevent a gluster split brain scenario

I created /gluster-volume on both proxmox01 and proxmox02, and then added this line to /etc/fstab(yes, I know it should really have been a systemd mount unit) on proxmox01:

gluster01:gluster-volume /gluster-volume glusterfs defaults,_netdev,x-systemd.automount,backupvolfile-server=gluster02 0 0
A screen shot of the command issued to add the gluster volume to fstab

And on proxmox02:

gluster02:gluster-volume /gluster-volume glusterfs defaults,_netdev,x-systemd.automount,backupvolfile-server=gluster01 0 0

On both systems, I ensured that /gluster-volume was created, and then ran mount -a.

The result of adding the line to staband then mounting the volume.

In the Proxmox UI, I went to the “Datacenter” and selected “Storage”, then “Add” and selected “Directory”.

A screen shot of adding a directory to the proxmox server

I set the ID to “gluster-volume”, the directory to “/gluster-volume”, ticked the “Shared” box and selected all the content types (it looks like a list box, but it’s actually a multi-select box).

The Add Directory dialogue screen shot

(I forgot to click “Shared” before I selected all the items under “Content” here.)

I clicked Add and it was available on both systems then.

A screen shot proving that the gluster volume has been added.

Backups

This one saved me from having to rebuild my Home Assistant system last week! Go into “Datacenter” and select the “Backup” option.

A screen shot of the backup screen in Proxmox, showing the location of the "add" button.

Click the “Add” button, select the storage you’ve just configured (gluster-volume) and a schedule (I picked daily at 04:00) and choose “Selection Mode” of “All”.

A screenshot of the dialogue box for creating the backup job

On the retention tab, I entered the number 3 for “Keep Daily”, “Keep Weekly”, “Keep Monthly” and “Keep Yearly”. Your retention needs are likely to be different to mine!

A screenshot of the dialogue box for creating the retention in the backup job
Proof that the backup job has been created.

If you end up needing to restore one of these backups, you need a different tool depending on whether it’s a LXC container or a QEMU virtual machine. For a container, you’d run:

vmid=199
pct restore $vmid /path/to/backup-file

For a virtual machine, you’d run:

vmid=199
qmrestore /path/to/backup-file $vmid

…and yes, you can replace the vmid=199 \n $vmidwith just the number for the VMID like this:

pct restore 123 /backup/vzdump-lxc-100-1970_01_01-04_00_00.tar.zst

If you need to point the storage at a different device (perhaps Gluster broke, or your external drive) you’d add --storage storage-label(e.g. --storage local-lvm)

Networking

The biggest benefit for me of a home lab is being able to build things on their own VLAN. A VLAN allows a single network interface to carry traffic for multiple logical networks, in such a way that other ports on the switch which aren’t configured to carry that logical network can’t access that traffic.

For example, I’ve configured my switch to have a new VLAN on it, VLAN 30. This VLAN is exposed to the two Proxmox servers (which can access all the VLANs) and also the port to my laptop. This means that I can run virtual machines on VLAN 30 which can’t be accessed by any other machine on my network.

There are two ways to do this, the “easy way” and the “explicit way”. Both ways produce the same end state, it’s just down to which makes more logical sense in your head.

In both routes, you must create the VLANs on your switch first – I’m just addressing the way of configuring Proxmox to pass this traffic to your network switch.

Note that these VLAN tagged interfaces also don’t have a DHCP server or Internet gateway (unless you create one), so any addresses will need to be manually configured in any installation screens.

The easy way

Go into the individual nodes and select the Network option in the sidebar (nested under “System”). You’ll need to perform these actions on both nodes.

Click on the “Linux Bridge” line which is aligned to your “trunked” network interface. For me, as I have a single network interface (enp2s0) I have a single Linux Bridge (vmbr0). Click “Edit” and tick the “VLAN aware” box and click “OK”.

A screen shot showing how to add VLAN awareness to the linux bridge configuration.
A screen shot showing the changes to /etc/network/interfaces

When you now create your virtual machines, on the hardware option in the sidebar, find the network interface and enter the VLAN tag you want to assign.

A screen shot showing how to configure the VLAN tag when creating a new virtual machine in Proxmox

(This screenshot shows no VLAN tag added, but it’s fairly clear where you’d put that tag in there)

The explicit way

Go into the individual nodes and select the Network option in the sidebar. You’ll need to perform all the steps in the section on both nodes!

Create a new “Linux VLAN” object.

A screen shot showing where to add the van on the proxmox node.

Call it by the name of the interface (e.g. enp2s0) followed by a dot and then the VLAN tag, like this enp2s0.30. Click Create.

A screenshot of the dialogue box for creating a VLAN tagged interface

Next create a new “Linux Bridge”.

A screen shot showing where to find the Bridge interface button

Call it vmbr and then the VLAN tag, like this vmbr30. Set the ports to the VLAN you just created (enp2s0.30)

A screen shot of the creation of the  bridge interface, with the addition of the bridge port previously created.
A screen shot of the changes to the /etc/network/interfaces screen.

(I should note that I added the comment between writing this guide and taking these screen shots)

When you create your virtual machines select this bridge for accessing that VLAN.

A screen shot of the selection of the VLAN tagged bridge.

Making machines run in “HA”

If you haven’t already done the part with the QDevice under clustering, go back there and run those steps! You need quorum to do this right!

YOU MUST HAVE THE SAME NETWORK AND STORAGE CONFIGURATION FOR HIGH AVAILABILITY AND MIGRATIONS. This means every VM which you want to migrate from proxmox01 to proxmox02 must use the same network interface and storage device, no matter which host it’s connected to.

  • If you’re connecting enp2s0 to VLAN 55 by using a VLAN Bridge called vmbr55, then both nodes need this VLAN Bridge available. Alternatively, if you’re using a VLAN tag on vmbr0, that’s fine, but both nodes need to have vmbr0 set to be “VLAN aware”.
  • If you’re using a disk on gluster-volume, this must be shared across the cluster

Go to “Datacenter” and select “Groups” which is nested under “HA” in the sidebar.

A screen shot of where to find the HA Group Creation button.

Create a new group (again, unimaginatively, I went with “proxmox”). Select both nodes and press Create.

A screen shot of the HA Group Creation dialogue box.

Now go to the “HA” option in the sidebar and verify you have quorum, although it doesn’t matter which is the master.

A screen shot showing how to verify the HA quorum status

Under resources on that page, click “Add”.

A screen shot showing where the add button is to enable HA of a virtual machine.

In the VM box, select the ID for the container or virtual machine you want to be highly available and click Add.

A screen shot of the dialogue box when setting up high availability of a virtual machine.

This will restart that machine or container in HA mode.

A screen shot showing the HA status of that virtual machine.

The wrap up!

So, after all of this, there’s still no virtual machines running (well, that Ubuntu Desktop is created but not running yet!) and I’ve not even started playing around with Terraform yet… but I’m feeling really positive about Proxmox. It’s close enough to the proprietary solutions I’ve used at work in the past that I’m reasonably comfortable with it, but it’s open enough to mess around under the surface. I’m looking forward to doing more experiments!

The featured image is of the comms rack in my garage showing how bad my wiring is when I can’t get to the back of a rack!! It’s released under a CC-0 license.

"Apoptosis Network (alternate)" by "Simon Cockell" on Flickr

My Home Automation Tooling and Devices

Following a quick conversation with a neighbour today, I thought I’d do a run-down of (and links to) the technology I’m using in my house :)

The devices

Amazon Alexa and Fire Devices

I’ve been a fan of these for some time! I have Echo Dots, an Echo Show and a few Echo Flex devices. I also have an Echo Auto, which was rubbish.

My TV, although it’s nominally “smart”, I prefer to be able to swap out the “smart” part, and so I also have a Fire TV stick for actually consuming content. I previously tested a FireTV Cube, and would have loved to have kept that, but I had to return it.

Ring Stick-up Camera

In a previous role, I was asked to test a Ring Stick-up Camera. When I left, they said I was allowed to keep it. The device is OK, but I probably wouldn’t have bought it if it wasn’t sent to me.

Tuya Wifi Enabled Light and Mains Switches

I have a few different models of these things. Most of them are used just as wi-fi power switches, but a handful of them also do power monitoring too. In my last set of works, I also got a couple of the light switches too.

Computers

Previously, I was using a handful of Raspberry Pi devices to run all of this lot. I had a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, 4GB and a couple of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ devices too. Recently, I’ve moved all my main computing workloads off these, and on to a pair of these Dell Optiplex 3040M i5 with 16GB RAM. That’s not to say they’ve gone unused now (no, I’m running Octopi amongst other things) but my main lab stuff isn’t on those any more.

The software

Hypervisor: Proxmox

Previously (pre-Pi), my computers would be running an Ubuntu variant, and everything would be running Docker containers or virtual machines with Vagrant, but after the last few months of wall-to-wall Proxmox recommendations, when I got those two PCs, they were immediately setup as a Proxmox Cluster. I did a few of the tweaks from tteck’s Proxmox VE Helper Scripts page.

Storage: gluster

I have a cluster of two machines, and I want to be able to migrate between the pair of them. To get this working, I setup Gluster following this YouTube tutorial. This gives me storage across the pair of servers, and lets me live migrate any virtual machines and containers between the pair of them. At some point in the future, I’ll be setting up nfs-ganesha-gluster on there too, to allow virtual machines to have object storage rather than block storage as needed.

Home Automation: Home Assistant OS

This was what I was running on my Raspberry Pi, and so it was a no-brainer to port the configuration over. While I could have set a virtual machine up by hand, instead I used tteck’s helper script, which asked me to run this command:

bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/tteck/Proxmox/raw/main/vm/haos-vm.sh)"

It’s always slightly suspicious when someone asks you to run a shell script without checking it, so I downloaded the script first, checked it over (as much as one can), and then ran it from the system. It’s not the most secure way to do it, but I was satisfied with what I was seeing that let me trust it.

Remote access: Tailscale

Tailscale is a mesh VPN product, using the great Wireguard VPN product. I previously experimented with Nebula, and while I’d still endorse it to anyone who is keen to run their own infrastructure, sadly I failed on certificate basics with Nebula on my home network, and Tailscale moves all that away from my headspace. I can see more scope for automation with Nebula, but the extra controls needed were too much for me.

Plugins, Extensions and Add-Ons

Android App: Home Assistant

OK, so this is more of a “nice to have” than a “needed” thing, but with this I can determine who’s in the house, and can track battery usage for the devices. It also means I can see and manipulate the Home Assistant dashboard.

Android App: Smart Home (Tuya)

Only really needed for the initial set-up of the Smart Devices, sometimes it’s useful to see power used over time, or to find out what the MAC address of the device is (for making sure it’s on your network), and whether it’s actually getting a reasonable signal from your WiFi router.

Home Assistant Add-ons: HACS and Alexa Media Player

HACS is a meta-add-on; it helps you to add more integrations to Home Assistant. With this, I can integrate my Amazon Echo devices.

Home Assistant Integration: Tuya

This is how I control my smart switches and monitor the power consumption. I needed an account on the Tuya IoT platform and the SmartHome Application.

Configuration

Home Assistant Blueprint: “Turn a switch off after a defined set of time”

I followed this thread (which didn’t give me what I needed), and ended up writing my own blueprint. I use this for things like radiators and heated blankets.

Home Assistant Blueprint: “Notify or do something when an appliance like a dishwasher or washing machine finishes”

I … um … use this exactly as defined; it’s hooked up to the switch on the washing machine and dishwasher, and notifies me via Pushbullet when they’re both done, giving me a fighting chance of emptying them before my wife has to.

Featured image is “Apoptosis Network (alternate)” by “Simon Cockell” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY license.

DisplayLink and ZFS on Ubuntu = Recovery Console (a work-around)

Today I filed an issue on the DisplayLink/EVDI Github Repository.

I recently obtained a new laptop, so installed Ubuntu with the encrypted ZFS root filesystem. This all works great! I then installed the DisplayLink drivers using the system recommended by Synaptics;

wget https://www.synaptics.com/sites/default/files/Ubuntu/pool/stable/main/all/synaptics-repository-keyring.deb
sudo apt install ./Downloads/synaptics-repository-keyring.deb
sudo apt update
sudo apt install displaylink-driver

At which point I’m prompted to reboot my system. All good, so far.

Except, what I’m presented with is a recovery console, asking me to enter my root password!

Fortunately, I’d had the common sense to set the password for my root account (sudo passwdwill do it), so I could sign in and start to figure out what was going on.

In my logs, I looked for anything to do with “displaylink”, and found this line:

Apr 28 11:13:05 jonspriggs-Kratos-EL04R6 systemd-udevd[1912]: 4-3.1.3:1.0: Spawned process '/opt/displaylink/udev.sh /dev /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb4/4-3/4-3.1/4-3.1.3/4-3.1.3:1.0 usb-004-004-DisplayLink_PR09_DisplayPort_Dock_YVFJ093338 /dev/bus/usb/004/004' [2280] is taking longer than 59s to complete

Just after, it showed this log:

Apr 28 11:14:05 jonspriggs-Kratos-EL04R6 systemd[1]: systemd-udev-settle.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
░░ Subject: Unit process exited
░░ Defined-By: systemd
░░ Support: http://www.ubuntu.com/support
░░ 
░░ An ExecStart= process belonging to unit systemd-udev-settle.service has exited.
░░ 
░░ The process' exit code is 'exited' and its exit status is 1.

So, my initial response was to purge the displaylink-driver (which I did, and it worked), but I actually quite like this dock, so I re-installed the driver and took a look at what else was in there.

Between the systemd-udev-settle.service starting and finishing with an error was this log entry:

Apr 28 11:12:05 jonspriggs-Kratos-EL04R6 udevadm[1890]: systemd-udev-settle.service is deprecated. Please fix zfs-load-module.service, zfs-import-cache.service not to pull it in.

Hmm, I wonder if that’s what the issue is?! So, I edited zfs-load-module.service (/lib/systemd/system/zfs-load-module.service) and zfs-import-cache.service (/lib/systemd/system/zfs-import-cache.service) files commenting out the line: Requires=systemd-udev-settle.serviceand restarted.

The system booted straight up! Huzzah!

I’ve had a look in the logs, and prior to installing the DisplayLink driver, I was getting this error above, but as systemd-udev-settle wasn’t failing to start, it wasn’t preventing zfs from loading, which in turn was preventing the boot, so the issue is definitely somewhere between DisplayLink and systemd-udev-settle, but we’ll see what happens as a result of this issue.

Note to self… Finding your IP address when HTTP is proxied

Due to … issues with my home Internet service at the moment, I’m currently tethered to an EE mobile phone for my outbound Internet access. For 99.9% of access, this is fine, however… not when you create dynamic security groups based on your own IP address. For whatever reason (I’m guessing they’re doing HTTP(S) proxying to perform some traffic analysis) when you make HTTP requests, you appear as one IP address, but when you make any other type of request, you get another.

In order to test this, I ran some checks (I’ve changed the first three octets for privacy);

# DNS Check
$ dig +short txt ch whoami.cloudflare @1.0.0.1
"192.0.2.232"
# HTTP Check
curl http://ipv4.icanhazip.com
192.0.2.235
# HTTPS Check
curl https://ipv4.icanhazip.com
192.0.2.235
# SSH Check
$ ssh ipv4.sshmyip.com
The authenticity of host 'ipv4.sshmyip.com (64:ff9b::313:6f08)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is SHA256:OhNL391d/beeFnxxg18AwWVYTAHww+D4djEE7Co0Yng.
This key is not known by any other names
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'ipv4.sshmyip.com' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
{


"comment": "##     Your IP Address is 192.0.2.235 (54140)     ##",


"family": "ipv4",
"ip": "192.0.2.235",
"port": "54140",
"protocol": "ssh",
"version": "v1.3.0",
"website": "https://github.com/packetsar/checkmyip",
"sponsor": "Sponsored by ConvergeOne, https://www.convergeone.com/"
}
 Connection to ipv4.sshmyip.com closed by remote host.
Connection to ipv4.sshmyip.com closed.

So, I guess, what this tells us is that I can’t guarantee what IP address I’ll be using, but at least I know it’s one of those two!

Using multiple GitHub accounts from the Command Line with Environment Variables (using `direnv`) and per-account SSH keys

I recently was in the situation where I had two github profiles (one work, one personal) that I needed to incorporate in projects.

My work account on this device is my “default”, I use it to push, pull and so on, but the occasional personal activities (like terminate-notice) all should be attributed to my personal account.

To make this happen, I used direnv which reads a .envrcfile in the parents of the directory you’re currently in. I created a directory for my personal projects – ~/Code/Personaland placed a .envrc file which contains:

export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL=jon@sprig.gs
export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL=jon@sprig.gs
export GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -i ~/.ssh/personal.id_ed25519"
export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=

This means that I have a specific SSH key just for my personal activities (~/.ssh/personal.id_ed25519) and I’ve got my email address defined as two environment variables – AUTHOR (who wrote the code) and COMMITTER (who added it to the tree) – both are required when you’re changing them like this!

Because I don’t ever want it to try to use my SSH Agent, I’ve added the fact that SSH_AUTH_SOCK should be empty.

As an aside, work also require Commit Signing, but I don’t want to use that for my personal projects right now, so I also discovered a new feature as-of 2020 – the environment variables GIT_CONFIG_KEY_x, GIT_CONFIG_VALUE_x and GIT_CONFIG_COUNT=x

By using these, you can override any system, global and repo-level configuration values, like this:

export GIT_CONFIG_KEY_0=commit.gpgSign
export GIT_CONFIG_VALUE_0=false
export GIT_CONFIG_KEY_1=push.gpgSign
export GIT_CONFIG_VALUE_1=false
export GIT_CONFIG_KEY_2=tag.gpgSign
export GIT_CONFIG_VALUE_2=false
export GIT_CONFIG_COUNT=2

This ensures that I *will not* GPG Sign commits, tags or pushes.

If I accidentally cloned a repo into an unusual location, or on purpose need to make a directory or submodule a personal repo, I just copy the .envrc file into that part of the tree, run direnv allowand hey-presto! I’ve turned that area into a personal repo, without having to remember the .gitconfigstring to mark a new part of my tree as a personal one.

The direnv and SSH part was largely inspired by : Handle multiple github accounts while the GIT_CONFIG_* bit was found via this StackOverflow answer.

Featured image is “Mirrored Lotus” by “Faye Mozingo” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.

Using Github Actions to create Debian (DEB) and RedHat (RPM) Packages and Repositories

Last week I created a post talking about the new project I’ve started on Github called “Terminate-Notice” (which in hindsight isn’t very accurate – at best it’s ‘spot-instance-responses’ and at worst it’s ‘instance-rebalance-and-actions-responder’ but neither work well)… Anyway, I mentioned how I was creating RPM and DEB packages for my bash scripts and that I hadn’t put it into a repo yet.

Well, now I have, so let’s wander through how I made this work.

TL;DR:

Please don’t hesitate to use the .github directory I’m using for terminate-notice, which is available in the -skeleton repo and then to make it into a repo, you can reuse the .github directory in the terminate-notice.github.io repo to start your adventure.

Start with your source tree

I have a the following files in my shell script, which are:

  • /usr/sbin/terminate-notice (the actual script which will run)
  • /usr/lib/systemd/system/terminate-notice.service (the SystemD Unit file to start and stop the script)
  • /usr/share/doc/terminate-notice/LICENSE (the license under which the code is released)
  • /etc/terminate-notice.conf.d/service.conf (the file which tells the script how to run)

These live in the root directory of my repository.

I also have the .github directory (where the things that make this script work will live), a LICENSE file (so Github knows what license it’s released under) and a README.md file (so people visiting the repo can find out about it).

A bit about Github Actions

Github Actions is a CI/CD pipeline built into Github. It responds to triggers – in our case, pushes (or uploads, in old fashioned terms) to the repository, and then runs commands or actions. The actions which will run are stored in a simple YAML formatted file, referred to as a workflow which contains some setup fields and then the “jobs” (collections of actions) themselves. The structure is as follows:

# The pretty name rendered by Actions to refer to this workflow
name: Workflow Name

# Only run this workflow when the push is an annotated tag starting v
on:
  push:
    tags:
      - 'v*'

# The workflow contains a collection of jobs, each of which has
# some actions (or "steps") to run
jobs:
  # This is used to identify the output in other jobs
  Unique_Name_For_This_Job:
    # This is the pretty name rendered in the Github UI for this job
    name: Job Name
    # This is the OS that the job will run on - typically
    # one of: ubuntu-latest, windows-latest, macos-latest
    runs-on: runner-os
    # The actual actions to perform
    steps:
      # This is a YAML list, so note where the hyphens (-) are
        # The pretty name of this step
      - name: Checkout Code
        # The name of the public collection of actions to perform
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
        # Any variables to pass into this action module
        with:
          path: "REPO"

      # This action will run a shell command
      - name: Run a command
        run: echo "Hello World"

Build a DEB package

At the simplest point, creating a DEB package is;

  1. Create the directory structure (as above) that will unpack from your package file and put the files in the right places.
  2. Create a DEBIAN/control file which provides enough details for your package manager to handle it.
  3. Run dpkg-deb --build ${PATH_TO_SOURCE} ${OUTPUT_FILENAME}

The DEBIAN/control file looks like this:

Package: PACKAGE_NAME
Version: VERSION_ID
Section: misc
Priority: optional
Architecture: all
Maintainer: YOUR_NAME <your_email@example.org>
Description: SOME_TEXT

Section, Priority and Architecture have specifically defined dictionaries you can choose from.

Assuming the DEBIAN/control file was static and also lived in the repo, and I were just releasing the DEB file, then I could make the above work with the following steps:

name: Create the DEB

permissions:
  contents: write

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - 'v*'

jobs:
  Create_Packages:
    name: Create Package
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          path: "REPO"

      - name: Copy script files around to stop .github from being added to the package then build the package
        run: |
          mkdir PKG_SOURCE
          cp -Rf REPO/usr REPO/etc REPO/DEBIAN PKG_SOURCE
          dpkg-deb --build PKG_SOURCE package.deb

      - name: Release the Package
        uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v1
        with:
          files: package.deb

But no, I had to get complicated and ALSO build an RPM file… and put some dynamic stuff in there.

Build an RPM file

RPMs are a little more complex, but not by much. RPM takes a spec file, which starts off looking like the DEBIAN/control file, and adds some “install” instructions. Let’s take a look at that spec file:

Name: PACKAGE_NAME
Version: VERSION_ID
Release: 1
Summary: SOME_TEXT
BuildArch: noarch
Source0: %{name}
License: YOUR_LICENSE

%description
SOME_TEXT
MORE_DETAIL

%prep

%build

%install
install -D -m 600 -o root -g root %{SOURCE0}etc/config/file ${RPM_BUILD_ROOT}%{_sysconfdir}/config/file
install -D -m 755 -o root -g root %{SOURCE0}usr/sbin/script ${RPM_BUILD_ROOT}%{_sbindir}/script

%files
etc/config/file
usr/sbin/script

The “Name”, “Version”, “Release” and “BuildArch” values in the top of that file define what the resulting filename is (NAME_VERSION-RELEASE.BUILDARCH.rpm).

Notice that there are some “macros” which replace /etc with %{_sysconfdir}, /usr/sbin with %{_sbindir} and so on, which means that, theoretically, this RPM could be installed in an esoteric tree… but most people won’t bother.

The one quirk with this is that %{name} bit there – RPM files need to have all these sources in a directory named after the package name, which in turn is stored in a directory called SOURCES (so SOURCES/my-package for example), and then it copies the files to wherever they need to go. I’ve listed etc/config/file and usr/sbin/script but these could just have easily been file and script for all that the spec file cares.

Once you have the spec file, you run sudo rpmbuild --define "_topdir $(pwd)" -bb file.spec to build the RPM.

So, again, how would that work from a workflow YAML file perspective, assuming a static spec and source tree as described above?

name: Create the DEB

permissions:
  contents: write

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - 'v*'

jobs:
  Create_Packages:
    name: Create Package
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          path: "REPO"

      - name: Copy script files around to stop .github from being added to the package then build the package
        run: |
          mkdir -p SOURCES/my-package-name
          cp -Rf REPO/usr REPO/etc SOURCES/my-package-name
          sudo rpmbuild --define "_topdir $(pwd)" -bb my-package-name.spec

      - name: Release the Package
        uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v1
        with:
          files: RPMS/my-package-name_0.0.1-1.noarch.rpm

But again, I want to be fancy (and I want to make resulting packages as simple to repeat as possible)!

So, this is my release.yml as of today:

name: Run the Release

permissions:
  contents: write

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - 'v*'

jobs:
  Create_Packages:
    name: Create Packages
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          path: "REPO"

      - name: Calculate some variables
        run: |
          (
            echo "GITHUB_REPO_NAME=$(echo "${GITHUB_REPOSITORY}" | cut -d/ -f2)"
            echo "VERSION=$(echo "${GITHUB_REF_NAME}" | sed -e 's/^v//')"
            echo "DESCRIPTION=A script which polls the AWS Metadata Service looking for an 'instance action', and triggers scripts in response to the termination notice."
            echo "DEB_ARCHITECTURE=${ARCHITECTURE:-all}"
            echo "RPM_ARCHITECTURE=${ARCHITECTURE:-noarch}"
            echo "RELEASE=1"
            cd REPO
            echo "FIRST_YEAR=$(git log $(git rev-list --max-parents=0 HEAD) --date="format:%Y" --format="format:%ad")"
            echo "THIS_COMMIT_YEAR=$(git log HEAD -n1 --date="format:%Y" --format="format:%ad")"
            echo "THIS_COMMIT_DATE=$(git log HEAD -n1 --format="format:%as")"
            if [ "$FIRST_YEAR" = "$THIS_COMMIT_YEAR" ]
            then
              echo "YEAR_RANGE=$FIRST_YEAR"
            else
              echo "YEAR_RANGE=${FIRST_YEAR}-${THIS_COMMIT_YEAR}"
            fi
            cd ..
          ) >> $GITHUB_ENV

      - name: Make Directory Structure
        run: mkdir -p "SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}" SPECS release

      - name: Copy script files into SOURCES
        run: |
          cp -Rf REPO/[a-z]* "SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}"
          cp REPO/LICENSE REPO/README.md "SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}/usr/share/doc/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}/"
          if grep -lr '#TAG#' SOURCES
          then
            sed -i -e "s/#TAG#/${VERSION}/" $(grep -lr '#TAG#' SOURCES)
          fi
          if grep -lr '#TAG_DATE#' SOURCES
          then
            sed -i -e "s/#TAG_DATE#/${THIS_COMMIT_YEAR}/" $(grep -lr '#TAG_DATE#' SOURCES)
          fi
          if grep -lr '#DATE_RANGE#' SOURCES
          then
            sed -i -e "s/#DATE_RANGE#/${YEAR_RANGE}/" $(grep -lr '#DATE_RANGE#' SOURCES)
          fi
          if grep -lr '#MAINTAINER#' SOURCES
          then
            sed -i -e "s/#MAINTAINER#/${MAINTAINER:-Jon Spriggs <jon@sprig.gs>}/" $(grep -lr '#MAINTAINER#' SOURCES)
          fi

      - name: Create Control File
        # Fields from https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#binary-package-control-files-debian-control
        run: |
          mkdir -p SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}/DEBIAN
          (
            echo "Package:      ${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}"
            echo "Version:      ${VERSION}"
            echo "Section:      ${SECTION:-misc}"
            echo "Priority:     ${PRIORITY:-optional}"
            echo "Architecture: ${DEB_ARCHITECTURE}"
            if [ -n "${DEPENDS}" ]
            then
              echo "Depends: ${DEPENDS}"
            fi
            echo "Maintainer: ${MAINTAINER:-Jon Spriggs <jon@sprig.gs>}"
            echo "Description: ${DESCRIPTION}"
            if [ -n "${HOMEPAGE}" ]
            then
              echo "Homepage: ${HOMEPAGE}"
            fi
          ) | tee SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}/DEBIAN/control
          (
            echo "Files:"
            echo " *"
            echo "Copyright: ${YEAR_RANGE} ${MAINTAINER:-Jon Spriggs <jon@sprig.gs>}"
            echo "License: MIT"
            echo ""
            echo "License: MIT"
            sed 's/^/ /' "SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}/usr/share/doc/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}/LICENSE"
          ) | tee SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}/DEBIAN/copyright

      - name: Create Spec File
        run: PATH="REPO/.github/scripts:${PATH}" create_spec_file.sh

      - name: Build DEB Package
        run: dpkg-deb --build SOURCES/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME} "${{ env.GITHUB_REPO_NAME }}_${{ env.VERSION }}_${{ env.DEB_ARCHITECTURE }}.deb"

      - name: Build RPM Package
        run: sudo rpmbuild --define "_topdir $(pwd)" -bb SPECS/${GITHUB_REPO_NAME}.spec

      - name: Confirm builds complete
        run: sudo install -m 644 -o runner -g runner $(find . -type f -name *.deb && find . -type f -name *.rpm) release/

      - name: Release
        uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v1
        with:
          files: release/*

So this means I can, within reason, drop this workflow (plus a couple of other scripts to generate the slightly more complex RPM file – see the other files in that directory structure) into another package to release it.

OH WAIT, I DID! (for the terminate-notice-slack repo, for example!) All I actually needed to do there was to change the description line, and off it went!

So, this is all well and good, but how can I distribute these? Enter Repositories.

Making a Repository

Honestly, I took most of the work here from two fantastic blog posts for creating an RPM repo and a DEB repo.

First you need to create a GPG key.

To do this, I created the following pgp-key.batch file outside my repositories tree

%echo Generating an example PGP key
Key-Type: RSA
Key-Length: 4096
Name-Real: YOUR_ORG_NAME
Name-Email: your_org_name@users.noreply.github.com
Expire-Date: 0
%no-ask-passphrase
%no-protection
%commit

To make the key, I used this set of commands:

export GNUPGHOME="$(mktemp -d /tmp/pgpkeys-XXXXXX)"
gpg --no-tty --batch --gen-key pgp-key.batch
gpg --armor --export YOUR_ORG_NAME > public.asc
gpg --armor --export-secret-keys YOUR_ORG_NAME > private.asc
rm -Rf "$GNUPGHOME"

Store the public.asc file to one side (you’ll need it later) and keep the private.asc safe because we need to put that into Github.

Creating Github Pages

Create a new Git repository in your organisation called your-org.github.io. This marks the repository as being a Github Pages repository. Just to make that more explicit, in the settings for the repository, go to the pages section. (Note that yes, the text around this may differ, but are accurate as of 2023-03-28 in EN-GB localisation.)

Under “Source” select “GitHub Actions”.

Clone this repository to your local machine, and copy public.asc into the root of the tree with a sensible name, ending .asc.

In the Github settings, find “Secrets and variables” under “Security” and pick “Actions”.

Select “New repository secret” and call it “PRIVATE_KEY”.

Now you can use this to sign things (and you will sign *SO MUCH* stuff)

Building the HTML front to your repo (I’m using Jekyll)

I’ve elected to use Jekyll because I know it, and it’s quite easy, but you should pick what works for you. My workflow for deploying these repos into the website rely on Jekyll because Github built that integration, but you’ll likely find other tools for things like Eleventy or Hugo.

Put a file called _config.yml into the root directory, and fill it with relevant content:

title: your-org
email: email_address@example.org
description: >- 
  This project does stuff.
baseurl: ""
url: "https://your-org.github.io"
github_username: your-org

# Build settings
theme: minima
plugins:
  - jekyll-feed
exclude:
  - tools/
  - doc/

Naturally, make “your-org” “email_address@example.org” and the descriptions more relevant to your environment.

Next, create an index.md file with whatever is relevant for your org, but it must start with something like:

---
layout: home
title: YOUR-ORG Website
---
Here is the content for the front page.

Building the repo behind your static content

We’re back to working with Github Actions workflow files, so let’s pop that open.

.github/workflows/repo.yml

name: Deploy Debian and RPM Repo plus Jekyll homepage

on:
  push:
    branches: ["main"]
  # Allows you to run this workflow manually from the Actions tab
  workflow_dispatch:

permissions:
  contents: read
  pages: write
  id-token: write

concurrency:
  group: "pages"
  cancel-in-progress: false

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: [REPO] Install required packages
        run: |
          until sudo apt update
          do
            sleep 1
          done
          sudo apt install -y jq createrepo-c coreutils gnupg2 dpkg-dev

      - name: [REPO] Insert environment variables
        run: |
          echo GNUPGHOME="$(mktemp -d /tmp/pgpkeys-XXXXXX)" >> $GITHUB_ENV
          echo REPO_OWNER="$(echo "${GITHUB_REPOSITORY}" | cut -d/ -f1)" >> $GITHUB_ENV
          echo REPO_NAME="$(echo "${GITHUB_REPOSITORY}" | cut -d/ -f2)" >> $GITHUB_ENV

      - name: [REPO] Import GPG key
        id: import_gpg
        uses: crazy-max/ghaction-import-gpg@v5
        with:
          gpg_private_key: ${{ secrets.PRIVATE_KEY }}

      - name: [JEKYLL] Setup Pages
        uses: actions/configure-pages@v3

      - name: [JEKYLL] Build with Jekyll
        uses: actions/jekyll-build-pages@v1
        with:
          source: ./
          destination: ./_site

      - name: [REPO] Set permissions on the _site directory
        run: sudo chown -R runner:docker _site

      - name: [REPO] Build DEB and RPM Repos
        run: |
          export GPG_FINGERPRINT="${{ steps.import_gpg.outputs.fingerprint }}"
          export ORIGIN="${{ steps.import_gpg.outputs.name }}"
          .github/scripts/build_repos.sh

      - name: [JEKYLL] Upload artifact
        uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v1

  deploy:
    environment:
      name: github-pages
      url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: build
    steps:
      - name: [JEKYLL] Deploy to GitHub Pages
        id: deployment
        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v1

I’ve basically changed the “stock” Jekyll static site Github Actions file and added every step that starts [REPO] to make the repository stuff fit in around the steps that start [JEKYLL] which build and deploy the Jekyll based site.

The key part to all this though is the step Build DEB and RPM repos which calls a script that downloads all the RPM and DEB files from the various other repository build stages and does some actions to them. Now yes, I could have put all of this into the workflow.yml file, but I think it would have made it all a bit more confusing! So, let’s work through those steps!

Making an RPM Repo

To build a RPM repo you get and sign each of the RPM packages you want to offer. You do this with this command:

rpm --define "%_signature gpg" --define "%_gpg_name ${FINGERPRINT}" --addsign FILENAME.rpm

Then, once you have all your RPM files signed, you then run a command called createrepo_c (available in Debian archives – Github Actions doesn’t have a RedHat based distro available at this time, so I didn’t look for the RPM equivalent). This creates the repository metadata, and finally you sign that file, like this:

gpg --detach-sign --armor repodata/repomd.xml

Making a DEB Repo

To build a DEB repo you get each of the DEB packages you want to offer in a directory called pool/main (you can also call “main” something else – for example “contrib”, “extras” and so on).

Once you have all your files, you create another directory called dists/stable/main/binary-all into which we’ll run a command dpkg-scanpackages to create the list of the available packages. Yes, “main” could also be called “contrib”, “extras” and “stable” could be called “testing” or “preprod” or the name of your software release (like “jaunty”, “focal” or “warty”). The “all” after the word “binary” is the architecture in question.

dpkg-scanpackages creates an index of the packages in that directory including the version number, maintainer and the cryptographic hashes of the DEB files.

We zip (using gzip and bzip2) the Packages file it creates to improve the download speeds of these files, and then make a Release file. This in turn has the cryptographic hashes of each of the Packages and zipped Packages files, which in turn is then signed with GPG.

Ugh, that was MESSY

Making the repository available to your distributions

RPM repos have it quite easy here – there’s a simple file, that looks like this:

[org-name]
name=org-name Repository
baseurl=https://org-name.github.io/rpm
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://org-name.github.io/public.asc

The distribution user simply downloads this file, puts it into /etc/yum.sources.d/org-name.repo and now all the packages are available for download. Woohoo!

DEB repos are a little harder.

First, download the public key – https://org-name.github.io/public.asc and put it in /etc/apt/keyrings/org-name.asc. Next, create file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/org-name.list with this line in:

deb [arch=all signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/org-name.asc] https://org-name.github.io/deb stable main

And now they can install whatever packages they want too!

Doing this the simple way

Of course, this is all well-and-good, but if you’ve got a simple script you want to package, please don’t hesitate to use the .github directory I’m using for terminate-notice, which is available in the -skeleton repo and then to make it into a repo, you can reuse the .github directory in the terminate-notice.github.io repo to start your adventure.

Good luck, and let me know how it goes!

Featured image is “Some Math” by “Behdad Esfahbod” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY license.

Quick tip: Preventing `Vagrant Destroy`

I’m using Vagrant to test out some scripts, and I really need to stop myself from destroying my caching proxy that I’m running in the test.

To do that, I’ve got this Vagrantfile:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.define "caching-proxy" do |this|
    this.trigger.before :destroy do |trigger|
      trigger.info = "This machine is currently prevented from being destroyed. Please remove the trigger to be able to destroy it.
      trigger.abort = 1
    end
    this.vm.box = "ubuntu/jammy64"
    # etc
  end
  config.vm.define "normalnode" do |this|
    this.vm.box = "ubuntu/jammy64"
  end
end

Now when I try to run vagrant destroy caching-proxy I get:

==> caching-proxy: Running action triggers before destroy ...
==> caching-proxy: Running trigger...
==> caching-proxy: This machine is currently prevented from being destroyed. Please remove the trigger to destroy it.
==> caching-proxy: Vagrant has been configured to abort. Terminating now...

Running vagrant destroy normalnode I get:

    normalnode: Are you sure you want to destroy the 'normalnode' VM? [y/N] y
==> normalnode: Forcing shutdown of VM...
==> normalnode: Destroying VM and associated drives...

Perfect.

Featured image is “Explosion” by “Quinn Dombrowski” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY-SA License.

Responding to AWS Spot Instance “Instance Actions” (like terminate and stop)

During some debugging of an issue with our AWS Spot Instances at work, a colleague noticed that we weren’t responding to the Instance Actions that AWS sends when it’s due to shut down a spot instance.

We had a bit of a poke around, and found that no-one seems to have a service solution to respond to these events, to shut things down cleanly… so I wrote a set of shell scripts and a SystemD service to react to them.

On the journey, I discovered that there is a metadata mocking service that AWS provides, I learned how to create both RPM and DEB packages with Github actions (still not got them into a repo yet though!) and found that my new employer is really nice because they let me write this and release it as open source 😀

So, if this seems like something that might help you, or perhaps you’ve found a better way of doing this, let me know!

A screen shot of the github organisation for the terminate-notice script (link)

Project logo: Target icons created by Freepik – Flaticon

"Apoptosis Network (alternate)" by "Simon Cockell" on Flickr

Multipass on Ubuntu with Bridged Network Interfaces

I’m working on a new project, and I am using Multipass on an Ubuntu machine to provision some virtual machines on my local machine using cloudinit files. All good so far!

I wanted to expose one of the services I’ve created to the bridged network (so I can run avahi-daemon), and did this by running multipass launch -n vm01 --network enp3s0 when, what should I see but: launch failed: The bridging feature is not implemented on this backend. OH NO!

By chance, I found a random Stack Overflow answer, which said:

Currently only the LXD driver supports the networks command on Linux.

So, let’s make multipass on Ubuntu use LXD! (Be prepared for entering your password a few times!)

Firstly, we need to install LXD. Dead simple:

snap install lxd

Next, we need to tell snap that it’s allowed to connect LXD to multipass:

snap connect multipass:lxd lxd

And lastly, we tell multipass to use lxd:

multipass set local.driver=lxd

Result?

user@host:~$ multipass networks
Name             Type      Description
enp3s0           ethernet  Ethernet device
mpbr0            bridge    Network bridge for Multipass

And when I brought my machine up with avahi-daemon installed and configured to broadcast it’s hostname?

user@host:~$ ip -4 addr
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
37: br-enp3s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP group default qlen 1000
    inet 192.0.2.33/24 brd 192.0.2.255 scope global dynamic noprefixroute br-enp3s0
       valid_lft 6455sec preferred_lft 6455sec
user@host:~$ multipass list
Name         State       IPv4             Image
vm01         Running     203.0.113.15     Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
                         192.0.2.101
user@host:~$ ping vm01.local
PING vm01.local (192.0.2.101) 56(84) bytes of data.

Tada!

Featured image is “Apoptosis Network (alternate)” by “Simon Cockell” on Flickr and is released under a CC-BY license.

Releasing a Presentation on “An introduction to Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)”

Over the last year, the team I was in had a routine that every week we’d have a briefing-come-good-news meeting. About a third of the way through the year the routine changed and it would be fronted by a presentation on a subject of interest to that team member. It was loosely encouraged to be relevant to the job, but it wasn’t a formal requirement.

For whatever reason, my slot got bumped (I think it was the day of the Queen’s funeral, but I’m not sure), and then I rescheduled myself for December… and the meeting was cancelled as we were having an in-person meetup. Bah.

Anyway, I wrote a deck, and planned to deliver it. That isn’t going to happen now, so I’m releasing it for anyone to read, or maybe even play Powerpoint Karaoke with.

Click here to visit the deck. Press “S” to see the speaker notes (you’ll need them!)