Recent content on A Random Walk Down Tech Street
Converting Butane to Ignition on Boot 
 We’ve received anecdotal evidence over the years that the
transpilation step where you must convert a Butane YAML configuration
into Ignition JSON before staring your CoreOS instance is a pain
for users to understand and implement. CoreOS developers also feel
this pain at times. 
 What if you could feed either a Butane YAML…
Problem 
 Sometimes you just don’t have a stable (or even functioning network) to
leverage when dealing with a piece of hardware. In all my years in
Linux admin/development I’ve always worked around this problem with
some sort of sneakernet ,
but there is another way. 
 Typically when bringing up new hardware one of the most basic
interfaces you have is a…
History 
 It’s a new year and it has been 5 years since the last time I updated
this blog post series. This time I’m updating to Fedora 41 and also
bringing forward a lot of changes I’ve made over the last 5 years. 
 As mentioned previously 
for now I’m using Fedora Silverblue 
on my laptop systems and continuing with a BTRFS+snapper setup for my…
Recently I looked into enabling and testing multipath on top of iSCSI
for Fedora and Red Hat CoreOS. As part of that process I had the
opportunity to learn about iSCSI, which I had never played with
before. I’d like to document for my future self how to go about
setting up an iSCSI server and how to then access the exported
devices from another system. 
 Setting up an…
Recently we
 switched 
our 9p filesystem usage in CoreOS Assembler to use
 virtiofs . 
 This is the technology behind a lot of new lightweight container VM
technology like kata-containers and
 libkrun , but can also be
easily used with libvirt . 
 Running as non-root using qemu:///session 
 Currently the virtiofs integration doesn’t work as non-root via…
Earlier this summer I spoke at the
 Fedora 38 release party 
about Fedora CoreOS. As part of this I had the privilege of giving the
presentation alongside Marc Pusey 
from Columbia University. Marc talked about how Columbia University uses
Fedora CoreOS and his experience participating in the Fedora and Fedora CoreOS
communities. 
 It was a real treat and quite nice to…
Someone recently asked me about locking down a bond to specific NIC
devices within the machine. Specifically they were concerned with
the sometimes unpredictable nature of NIC naming in Linux. 
 While there has been a lot of effort to make NIC naming more
predictable, it turns out with the networking configuration stack we
are using in Fedora/RHEL ( NetworkManager )
you…
Note: A more permanent version of this tutorial exists in the Fedora CoreOS documentation . 
 Fedora CoreOS recently started producing 64-bit ARM ( aarch64 ) artifacts. These images can be used as the Operating System for the Raspberry Pi 4 device. Before trying to get FCOS up and running on your Raspberry Pi4 you’ll want to Update the EEPROM to the latest version and choose how you want…
A couple of us recently gave an update to our Customer Experience team
at Red Hat on the improvements that were made in Red Hat CoreOS for
OpenShift 4.6. My part of the presentation focused on the new Live ISO
that is now used for Fedora/Red Hat CoreOS installations and also the
improvements that we made for being able to copy the install
environment networking configuration…
Introduction 
 I recently did a blog post
 series .
showing how to get started with
 OpenShift OKD on Fedora CoreOS for DigitalOcean. For that series
I wrote a script to do most of the heavy lifting because DigitalOcean
isn’t a native supported platform by the OpenShift installer. 
 Today I’ll show off how to get started in GCP, which is…
NOTE : The fourth post of this series is available here . 
 This blog post is the fifth in a series that illustrates how to
set up an OpenShift OKD cluster on
 DigitalOcean . 
 Back on August 17th I highlighted this blog post series with a
presentation and demo for the OKD working group’s Demo Marathon. 
 The video is posted on YouTube 
and also available below.…
Introduction 
 NOTE : The third post of this series is available here . 
 This blog post is the fourth in a series that illustrates how to
set up an OpenShift OKD cluster on
 DigitalOcean . The third post in the
series covered further configuration of a cluster once it’s already
up and running. At this point you should have a cluster up and running
and configured…
Introduction 
 NOTE : The second post of this series is available here . 
 This blog post is the third in a series that illustrates how to
set up an OpenShift OKD cluster on
 DigitalOcean . The second post in the
series covered the automated deployment and teardown of a cluster
using the digitalocean-okd-install script. At this point you should
have a cluster up and…
Introduction 
 NOTE : The first post of this series is available here . 
 This blog post is the second in a series that illustrates how to
set up an OpenShift OKD cluster on
 DigitalOcean . The first post in the
series covered some background information and pre-requisites needed
for deploying a cluster. At this point you should have chosen the domain
for your cluster,…
Introduction 
 This blog post is the first in a series that will illustrate how to
set up an OpenShift OKD cluster on
 DigitalOcean using the bare metal
install documentation (user provisioned infrastructure). OKD has tight
integrations with the Operating System and uses Fedora CoreOS as a
platform for driving the underlying infrastructure, thus we’ll be
deploying…
If you’ve ever had a chance to “nerd out” with me much I’ve probably
told you about at least one TUI that I use to make my daily work life
easier. Some of my favorites include
 htop ,
 tig ,
 tmux (not sure if tmux counts), etc.. 
 Lately I’ve been finding myself using Kubernetes/OpenShift much more
and I have often thought to myself I wish…
Introduction 
 With Fedora CoreOS we currently have two ways to do a bare metal
install and get our disk image onto the spinning rust of a “non-cloud”
server. You can
 use coreos.inst* kernel arguments to automate the install ,
or you can
 boot the Live ISO and get a bash prompt 
where you can then run coreos-installer directly after doing…
Introduction 
 NetworkManager 
allows connections to be defined in a configuration file known as a
 keyfile 
, which is a simple .ini-style formatted file with different
key=value pairs. In
 Fedora CoreOS 
we’ve elected to use NetworkManager with keyfiles as the way to
configure networking. In case you have a standard networking
environment with NICs…
Introduction 
 For some time now with
 virt-install 
(developed under virt-manager )
you have been able to specify a kernel and initial ramdisk to
start a VM with. The only problem is that the VM will always
start with that kernel/initrd (unless you change the definition
manually). If you are rapidly testing operating system installations
this can be problematic.…
Setting Up For The Lab 
 This lab uses a Fedora CoreOS image and several utilities
( fcct , ignition-validate ) to introduce a user to provisioning
and exploring a Fedora CoreOS system. This lab is written targeting
a Linux environment with a working libvirt / kvm setup. 
 To perform this lab you need
to download the tar archive at
 this link 
( signed checksum file…
History 
 It’s almost 2020. Fedora 31 came out a month back and I’m just getting
around to converting my desktop system to Fedora 31. As mentioned before,
for my laptop systems I’ve moved on to
 Fedora Silverblue . As I
continue to containerize my workflows I’m moving more and more of my
daily workflows into Flatpaks from
the Fedora registry, pet…
cross posted with this 
Project Atomic blog post 
 TL;DR Fedora 29 will be End Of Life soon . 
 With it Fedora Atomic Host will have its last incremental release (based on 
 the Fedora 29 stream). Please move to the Fedora CoreOS preview if you can. 
 Last year we introduced the plans for Fedora CoreOS 
including that Fedora CoreOS would be the successor to Fedora Atomic…
Introduction 
 With Fedora CoreOS Ignition 
is being used to configure nodes on first boot. While Ignition json
configs are not intended to be a tool that users typically interact
with (we are building tooling like
 fcct 
for that) I’ll show you an example of how to deliver a script to a
Fedora CoreOS (or RHEL CoreOS) host so that it will be run on first boot.…
Introduction 
 This is an update to my
 previous post 
about easily testing PXE booting by using libvirt + iPXE. 
 Several people have notified me (thanks Lukas Zapletal and others) that instead
of leveraging
 PXELINUX 
that I could just use an iPXE script to do the same thing. I hadn’t
used iPXE much so here’s an update on how to achieve the same…
History 
 It’s 2019 and I’m just getting around to converting my desktop system
to Fedora 29. For my work laptop I’ve moved on to
 Fedora Silverblue 
(previously known as Atomic Workstation)
and will probably move my desktop there soon too as I’ve had a good
experience so far. For now I’ll stick my desktop system to this old
setup with…
Update : A future
 post 
explains how to do this even easier without PXELINUX. 
 Introduction 
 Occasionally I have a need to test out a PXE install workflow. All of
this is super easy if you have a permanent PXE infrastructure you maintain
which traditionally has consisted of DHCP, TFTP and HTTP/FTP servers.
What if I just have my laptop and want to test something in a…
cross posted with this 
Project Atomic blog post 
 Introduction 
 This week we put out the first 
release of Fedora 29 Atomic Host. This will be the last major release
of Fedora Atomic Host as we prepare for Fedora CoreOS 
which will be released in Fedora 30. 
 In this post we’ll quickly list some known issues and then talk about updating
an existing Fedora 28…
Introduction 
 Last time I talked about 
using rpm-ostree-bisect ,
a tool that I wrote to automatically bisect the history of an
OSTree remote in order to find the exact commit when a problem was
introduced. I recently put the tool to the test again. 
 The Problem 
 Recently a user reported an issue 
where their system was seeing timeouts on boot. They…
Introduction 
 Occasionally in OS land we’ll come across a bug that snuck its way
into a build and has been in the wild for a while before anyone
notices it. One example is a
 recent bug 
(originally discovered 
by the community of CoreOS Container Linux) where the jumbo
packet MTU size of 9001 was no longer getting set properly on EC2
instances. 
 So we…
cross posted with this 
Project Atomic blog post 
 Introduction 
 RPM-OSTree/OSTree conveniently allows you to rollback if you upgrade
and don’t like the upgraded software. This is done by keeping around
the old deployment ; the old software you booted in to. After a
single upgrade you’ll have a booted deployement and the rollback deployment.
On the next…
Introduction 
 Earlier this month I was lucky enough to attend the
 2018 Fedora Infrastructure Hackfest .
It’s always a treat to hang out with some of the people who really
make Fedora tick.
 Sinny Kumari 
and I were there to help represent the
 Atomic Working Group ,
and also get some face time with each other to learn and hack on a
few things related to…
Introduction 
 In Fedora we are moving to a unified OSTree repo structure 
where there is a
single OSTree repository that is the remote for all branches of Fedora
(rawhide, branched, stable, etc). As part of this we want to be able
to define different retention policies for different branches within
the repository. For rawhide we’ll retain a few weeks worth of…
cross posted with this 
Project Atomic blog post 
 TL;DR 
 Fedora Atomic Host (and derivatives) will now include the firewalld 
package in the base OSTree that is tested, delivered, and released
every two weeks. Existing users should observe no change as it won’t
be enabled by default. 
 Firewalld in Atomic Host 
 In the past we have had requests to have…
History 
 I’m back again with the Fedora 27 edition of my Fedora BTRFS+Snapper
series. As you know, in the past I have configured my computers to be
able to snapshot and rollback the entire system by leveraging BTRFS 
snapshots, a tool called snapper , and a patched version of Fedora’s
 grub2 package. I have some great news this time! You no longer need
a…
cross posted with this 
Project Atomic blog post 
 Introduction 
 This week we put out the first 
release of Fedora 27 Atomic Host. Some quick notes: 
 
 
 In Fedora 27 Atomic Host we removed kubernetes from the base OSTree.
See Appendix A: Upgrading Systems with Kubernetes for more
information. 
 
 
 For Fedora 27 we are currently sticking with the…
Introduction 
 Hosting your own Atomic Host OSTree can be useful from time to time.
Maybe you want to try out something new or maybe you want to permanently
build your own custom tree and use it forever. It can be quite easy to set
up a build server and host the contents, especially for personal use. 
 This post will walk through setting up a server to do builds and…
Introduction 
 In Part 4 
of this series we learned about package layering and experimental
features of atomic host OSTree mutations. This included installing
packages from external repositories as well as removing and replacing
components of the base OSTree that was delivered with Atomic Host. We
also converted our localweb service to be hosted by a local
docker…
Introduction 
 In Part 3 
of this series we learned about rebasing, upgrading, and performing
rollbacks on Atomic Host. We also learned how files are restored during
a rollback operation and how to inspect the differences in RPM content
between each commit in the OSTree history of an Atomic Host using the
rpm-ostree command line tool. In this section we will cover the…
Introduction 
 In Part 2 
of this series we learned about configuring container storage
on Atomic Host. In this section we will cover the following topics
from the outline in Part 0 . 
 
 Atomic Host Rebasing 
 Atomic Host Upgrades and Rollbacks 
 Browsing OS History 
 
 Rebasing 
 One of the more fascinating aspects of Atomic Host techology is…
Introduction 
 In Part 1 
of this series we learned a little about the technology behind Atomic
Host and how to interact with a deployed system. In this section we
will cover the Configuring Storage for Containers topic from the
outline in Part 0 . 
 History of Container Storage 
 One of the early goals of Atomic Host was to be a good platform for
running…
Introduction 
 In Part 0 
of this series we helped get a Fedora 26 Atomic Host system set up
for the rest of this lab. In this section we will cover the
following topics from the outline: 
 
 Getting Familiar With Atomic Host 
 Viewing Changes To A Deployed System 
 
 Getting Familiar 
 Atomic Host is built on top of underlying technology known as…
Introduction 
 While Atomic Host has been around since 2014 there are still a lot of
people that aren’t as familiar with the technology. The Atomic team
within Red Hat, along with numerous other upstream contributors, have
brought the OSTree 
and RPM-OSTree 
technology a long way. At the Fedora user and contributor conference (known as
 Flock ) this week we will…
cross posted with this 
Project Atomic blog post 
 A new Fedora Atomic Host update is available via an OSTree commit: 
 Commit: f6331bcd14577e0ee43db3ba5a44e0f63f74a86e3955604c20542df0b7ad8ad6
Version: 26.101
 In this release we have fixed an issue 
with our qcow and vagrant images from the 20170723 release. If you used the qcow
or vagrant images from that release then…
a more permanent version of this content lives
 here 
 Introduction 
 NOTE: For background on OSTree check out the
 docs . 
 When you want to create a new OSTree using rpm-ostree you usually define
a few yum repos, and then a json file that says what rpms you
want to be composed in the tree. You then run an rpm-ostree compose tree command to create the commit in the…
cross posted with
 this 
Project Atomic blog post and this 
Fedora Magazine post 
 Introduction 
 In July we put out the
 first 
and
 second 
releases of Fedora 26 Atomic Host. In this blog post we’ll cover
updating an existing Fedora 25 Atomic Host system to Fedora 26.
We’ll cover preparing the system for upgrade and performing the upgrade.…



 
 
 cross posted from this_ fedora magazine post 
 Now that the Fedora Beta has been officially released the
 Fedora Atomic Working Group and Fedora Cloud SIG would like to get the
community together next week to find and squash some bugs. We are
organizing a test day for Tuesday, June 20th. 
 For this event we'll test both Atomic Host content…



 
 
 Cross posted with this_ Project Atomic Blog post 
 --- 
 With the latest release of Fedora Atomic Host we are now live in
 DigitalOcean ! This was a popular user request and thanks to
the folks at DigitalOcean and the Fedora Atomic Working Group 
we now have Fedora Atomic Host as an option when creating a droplet. Go ahead
and spin up a droplet…



 
 
 Cross posted with this_ Project Atomic Blog post 
 TL;DR : The default Fedora cadence for updates in the RPM streams is once a
day. Until now, the OSTree-based updates cadence has matched this, but
we're changing the default OSTree update stream to match the
Fedora Atomic Host image release cadence (once every two weeks). 
 ---



 
 
 
 History 
 I'm back again with the Fedora 25 edition of my Fedora BTRFS+Snapper
series. As you know, in the past I have configured my computers to be
able to snapshot and rollback the entire system by leveraging BTRFS 
snapshots, a tool called snapper , and a patched version of Fedora's
 grub2 package. I have updated the patchset (patches taken…



 
 
 Cross posted with this_ Project Atomic Blog post 
 
 Introduction 
 In part 1 of this series we used the OpenShift Ansible Installer 
to install Openshift Origin on three
servers that were running Fedora 25 Atomic Host . The three machines
we'll be using have the following roles and IP address configurations: 
…