Adding an IP address to a Bridge

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OpenShift requires a load balancer for providing access to the hosted applications. Although I can run a three node cluster, I need a fourth location to provide a load balancer that can then provide access to the cluster.

For my home lab set up, this means I want to run one on my bastion host….but it is already running HTTP and (FreeIPA) Red Hat IdM. I don’t want to break that. So, I want to add a second IP address to the bastion host, and have all of the existing services make use of the existing IP address. Only the new HA Proxy instance will use the new IP address.

This would be trivial for a simple Ethernet port, but I am using a Bridge, which makes it a touch trickier, but not terribly so.

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Content Based Access Control in Messaging

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In an OpenStack system, the communication between the compute nodes and the scheduler goes through a messaging system such as RabbitMQ. While there have been different models over the years, the basic assumption has remained that all actors identify themselves to the broker via a password and are trusted from that point forward.

What would happen if a compute node was compromised? The service running on the node could send any message one the bus that it wanted. Some of these messages are not ones that a compute node should ever send, such as “Migrate VM X to Node Y.” If the compromise was delivered via a VM, that hostile VM could then attempt to migrate itself to other nodes and compromise them, or could attempt to migrate other VMs to the compromised nodes and read their contents.

How could we mitigate attacks of this nature?

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Musical Midi Accompaniment: Understanding the Format

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Saxophone is a solo instrument. Unless you are into the sounds of Saxophone multiphonics, harmony requires playing with some other instrument. For Jazz, this tends to be a rhythms section of Piano, Bass, and Drums. As a kid, my practicing (without a live Rhythm section) required playing along with pre-recordings of tunes. I had my share of Jamie Aebersold records.

Nowadays, the tool of choice for most Jazz muscians, myself included is iReal Pro. A lovely little app for the phone. All of the Real Book tunes have their chord progressions been posted and generated. The format is simple enough.

But it is a proprietary app. While I continue to support and use it, I am also looking for alternatives that let me get more involved. One such tool is Musical MIDI Accompaniment. I’m just getting started with it, and I want to keep my notes here.

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Keystone and Cassandra: Parity with SQL

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Look back at our Pushing Keystone over the Edge presentation from the OpenStack Summit. Many of the points we make are problems faced by any application trying to scale across multiple datacenters. Cassandra is a database designed to deal with this level of scale. So Cassandra may well be a better choice than MySQL or other RDBMS as a datastore to Keystone. What would it take to enable Cassandra support for Keystone?

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Hidden Tuples

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If you are going to write a Sudoku solver, write a brute force, depth first search. You can get it running fast enough.

But what if you couldn’t? What if the puzzles were so big that solving them by brute force was not computationally feasible? A Sudoku puzzle is build on a basis of 3: The Blocks are 3X3, there are 3X 3 of them in the puzzle, and the rows and columns are are 9 cells (3 * 3) long. This approach scales up. If you were to do a basis of 4, you could use the Hexadecimal digits, and have 16 X 16 puzzles.

A Basis of K leads to a puzzle size of (K^4). The basis can be any integer. A Basis of 10 would lead to a puzzle size of 1000.

The Sudoku puzzle shows exponential growth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_explosion#Sudoku

What could you do for a complex puzzle? Use heuristics to reduce the problem set to the point where a the brute force algorithm can complete.

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