Erik L. Arneson — Writer and Software Developer

FOSSY 2023 was Excellent

2023-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural FOSSY conference in my home town of Portland, Oregon. FOSSY focuses on free and open source software, and included tracks on community, containers, compliance, diversity, gaming, and education. I got a chance to connect with friends and make new friends. It was an excellent event, and in this post I’ll just focus on some highlights.

Writing and Machine Learning

Software developers may get a lot of attention in FOSS spaces, but a lot of different types of contributions are required to create a successful open source project. The most significant contributions I’ve made to a large open source project have been writing for Kubernetes. Projects also need community leaders, software architects, web designers, publicity and marketing experts, and quality assurance technicians. There is plenty of space for additional contributions in almost every open source project.

FOSSY had some excellent sessions on writing, both from the point of view of a contributor to open source projects, and in examining how various open source projects can help the writer. Paco Nathan gave a very informative talk about language tools available for creators, focusing on machine learning, graph technology, and natural language processing. I also really enjoyed Kyle Davis’s talk on writing for open source projects. He discussed issues of style guides, adjusting your writing voice, and differentiating between marketing copy and open source writing.

Containers, Containers, Containers

The Container Days track was deeply technical and educational. I didn’t get to attend as much of this track as I would have liked, because there was too much to focus on across the conference. However, I did manage to catch Josh Berkus’s excellent talk, “The Cloud Native Burrito.” In it, Josh explained the composition of a fully cloud-native application using a delicious metaphor. Kubernetes is the tortilla of your application, while other essential components such as your container runtime and virtual network are the rice and beans. The metaphor went on—and yes, it was before lunch—until eventually though your stomach rumbled, Kubernetes made more sense.

There was also a talk on Development Containers that I really wanted to attend, but there was just too much!

Open Source Philosophy

The most thought-provoking talk I attended was “FOSS in World Affairs” by Delib. This talk deconstructed the philosophy of open source until it could be applied more broadly to larger social issues such as abuses of capitalism and the breakdown of social contracts. It generated a ton of discussion, including talk about how a corporation could be completely open-sourced, in a way that would welcome both collaboration and competition. I came away from this talk with a lot to think about.

I also attended a talk by Keith Bergelt on mitigating patent risks in open source projects. He introduced me to the Open Invention Network, which I feel I should have known about before. This organization seeks to cushion large open source projects from patent litigation through various means such as building a “patent non-aggression community”. Bergelt was careful to point out that there are plenty of companies out there who seek to stall open source by leveraging patents.

Conclusion: Do it Again

FOSSY was great. I hadn’t attended an open source conference in years, and it was really enjoyable to be around so many like-minded nerds. I hope they do it again next year! I’ll endeavor to attend again.

Installing Ansible 2.2.0 on a Raspberry Pi

2016-11-29T18:19:14+00:00

Ansible is a powerful IT automation tool with lots of modules and active development. Unfortunately, the only version available for stock Raspberry Pi is old. I wanted to use some of the newer modules and features, so I needed to install at least version 2.2. This tutorial will walk you through installing Ansible 2.2.0 on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian “jessie”. The version of Raspbian I did this on was tagged “2016-09-23”.

Creating a Debian package for Ansible requires a lot of prerequisites, including TeX Live, which can take up almost 2GB of space. If you don’t want to do this yourself, you can try downloading the Ansible package I built. It might be old by the time you read this, though!

Install Prerequisite Packages

Log into the terminal of your Raspberry Pi and run the following command to install the required packages.

sudo apt install asciidoc devscripts python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev cdbs sshpass -y

Download and Prepare the Ansible Repo

Ansible is available for download from GitHub. Use the following commands to retrieve the Ansible source code and modules.

git clone git://github.com/ansible/ansible.git --recursive
cd ansible/

Use these commands as a guide to select and checkout a stable Ansible release. The list of tags should give you clues as to which tag is the latest and not a development version.

git tag -l
git checkout v2.2.0.0-1
make deb

Your new .deb package will be located in ./deb-build/unstable/. You can install it with the dpkg command like this.

sudo dpkg -i ./deb-build/unstable/ansible_2.2.0.0-100.git201611010320.cdec853.HEAD~unstable_all.deb

Using the Newest Ansible Features

My goal was to use Ansible on my Raspberry Pi to implement my poor-man’s dynamic DNS solution. However, you might also want to use your RPi as a centralized Ansible hub to control a cluster like the Raspberry Pi Dramble. Also consider checking out the ansible-simple-slurm-cluster repo on GitHub for more ideas.

Let me know how you’re using Ansible on your Raspberry Pi in the comments!

A Poor-Man's Dynamic DNS with Ansible and Amazon Route53

2016-07-21T16:33:45+00:00

I wanted to be able to configure a DNS hostname dynamically, but couldn’t find an easy-to-use dynamic DNS client that suited my needs. Using Ansible and Amazon Route53, I put together a quick, effective solution.

Requirements

First, you need an AWS account with a Route53 DNS zone. I followed these directions to create a subdomain.

Next, you need a remote host that accessible via SSH. On that host, install Python and the Boto library. Make sure that Boto is configured with sufficient AWS credentials to access and change your Route53 zone.

Ansible Configuration

This section was updated on 2016-11-29 to reflect improvements I’ve made in the Ansible playbook.

Ansible made this task simple. In fact, the playbook below is mostly based on example recipes from the Ansible Route53 module documentation. The YAML playbook should look like the example below. Replace YOUR-ROUTE53-ZONE with the zone you configured in Route53. Replace YOUR-FULL-DYNAMIC-HOSTNAME with the fully-qualified domain name that you’ll use for dynamic DNS.

Note that this uses the ipify_facts Ansible module. You can use the default value or pass api_url like I’m doing in this example.

---
- name: Update Dynamic IP
  hosts: localhost
  vars:
    dyn_zone: YOUR-ROUTE53-ZONE
    dyn_hostname: YOUR-FULL-DYNAMIC-HOSTNAME
  tasks:
    - name: Get public IP
      ipify_facts: api_url=https://arnesonium.com/api/yourip.php
      connection: local
    - name: Get existing host information
      register: dynip
      route53:
        command: get
        zone: ""
        record: ""
        type: A
    - name: Delete existing host information
      when: ipify_public_ip != dynip.set.value
      route53:
        command: delete
        zone: ""
        record: ""
        ttl: ""
        type: ""
        value: ""
    - name: Create new host record
      when: ipify_public_ip != dynip.set.value
      route53:
        command: create
        zone: ""
        record: ""
        type: A
        ttl: 600
        value: ""

Running Your Playbook

I named my playbook dyndns.yml, so I run it with this shell command:

ansible-playbook -vv dyndns.yml

The -vv increases the verbosity so you can see what’s going on.

The Next Step

Next, I need to convince this script to run every time my laptop’s network comes back online. I’m sure there’s a good way to do that, but I haven’t spent much time looking into it.

Did this playbook work for you? Let me know! I’d love to get feedback on it.