openstack team mailing list archive

[Thomas Goirand <thomas@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ewan,

Thanks for your answer.

On 03/21/2012 07:05 AM, Ewan Mellor wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>>
>>> Also, have you tried using DevStack first? It is a good way to get
>> the hang of how the flags work.
>>
>> No it's not! DevStack is for testing with XenServer, and assumes that
>> you'd be working with Ubuntu. Here, I'm testing the Debian packages
>> that
>> we are working on in Debian. Please don't direct me to DevStack, this
>> wont help.
> 
> DevStack _will_ help, and that's why we keep telling you to go look
> there, and I have no idea why you keep refusing.

You are writing the above as if I was being difficult, and refusing to
do my homework. That isn't the case. I have read the scripts, and I did
understand most of it, but some parts are really not easy to understand
without the necessary background knowledge. Namely, the network setup,
which is what I am having issue with currently.

I'm trying to get the VLAN manager to work, and that mode isn't what
Devstack is setting-up: it's setting-up a FlatDHCP. I may try to do a
FlatDHCP to check if it works as expected, but that's not really
satisfying in production for a public cloud.

> You don't have to
> run it, but it's up-to-date, and it's working, so it's a nice, clean,
> self-documenting example of at least one way that someone has managed
> to make this work.

I really *don't agree* with the above. It's not self-documenting, it's
clearly a big hack (not clean at all) that works only in your specific
case (eg: if using CentOS and XenServer 5.6 with Ubuntu Oneiric). As you
said it's "one way" to do things only, and it's all but helping to write
a user documentation or a successful package.

> If you have differences between your system and DevStack because of
> the differences between Debian and Ubuntu or XenServer and XCP, then
> fine. If you have differences that you don't understand, then you're
> probably doing it wrong. That's why we tell you, on a weekly basis,
> to go look at DevStack if you want to see how a flag should be set.

I don't think that the issue is with flags.

> You can either do this the easy way, by following other people's
> working systems, or you can do it the hard way, by deep-diving
> into every single detail. I'm fine if you want to do it the hard
> way -- you'll certainly learn a lot, and it's probably very
> interesting and useful knowledge for the future. Just don't keep
> complaining that it's all too hard and then refuse to take the
> easy option.
> 
> Ewan.

I don't "keep complaining that it's too hard", I complain that there's
little to zero documentation of what is being done, and that one has to
double-guess what is going on in Devstack. You seem to believe that
Devstack is enough to replace a real documentation. If that is the case,
then you are doing a big mistake here.

Remember that I'm a Debian Developer, and that I've been running a
hosting business since 2003. I consider myself as an advance user, which
understands what a vlan is, how bridge is working, and that with all
this, it should be enough knowledge to understand what's going on in a
normal product. It's simply not the case with XCP + Openstack which is
lacking documentation. Have you, by the way, noticed that there's even a
bug that has been filled in Launchpad, about the lack of docs concerning
bridging, OVS and networking?

In a shorter way: if I'm telling you that Devstack isn't enough to
understand what's going on, please trust me!

Lucky, John Garbutt, Dave Scott and Salvatore Orlando have understand
all this, and are trying to help me. As Salvatore just wrote, I am
convince that I'm very close to have the setup working.

Salvatore Orlando has written back to me with some very valuable
information which I need to take time to understand now. I'll read it
carefully today, as I'm sure it will help.

Thomas

P.S: It well may be that there's a bug in Kronos, because when I do "xe
vlan-create", on the screen it's printed "script failing" or something.
I'll test it one more time in order to get the exact error message, and
probably will work with Mike on debugging this issue, which may be
related to the upgrade to the latest version of Open vSwitch (which is
1.4.0 in Debian).