Blow off some Steam , now officially released for Linux, by joining this Canonical sponsored Team Fortress 2 server deployed with Juju!

The idea was simple, and there was demand for it. I then spent the next eight months scrapping, rebuilding, and scrapping again until I was satisfied with the progress and overall functionality. During this time, I had heard rumors that Juju was building a UI. This news made my heart sink. How can I offer a SaaS solution if Juju comes with a UI out of the box? I was relieved to hear that it would probably be a UI that was available on the bootstrap node, making it only able to manage the current deployed environment. Amulet operates by managing multiple environments per user. I decided to press on. With UDS fast approaching, I increased work on the project, including splitting off the library I created to Github as a sign of good will that I eventually intended on releasing more portions open source. My goal was to show off the work so far and gain feedback from Juju developers and other charmers, eventually releasing a private beta shortly after UDS.

Early mock up of the “Juca” interface

Then Mark Shuttleworth broke my heart with the spectacular demo of the Juju GUI at ODS. Not only was the Juju GUI far more advanced than I predicted, it was better than what I had produced, and it was available right now. The entire Juju GUI team has done a spectacular job, their interface is innovative, easy to use, and makes managing Juju environments very simple. It’s another lesson learned as I continue my pursuits with my company, Ondina. First-mover advantage is a big one. This hurts in other ways, however. I wish I would have known about this, as I would have rather spent the past few months contributing to this project rather than pursuing my own. I’m excited to see what will come out of the Skunkworks project, and I believe this very issue could have been avoided if this was already in place, so I have hope for the future.

I’m not sure right now what the future holds for Amulet. In the next few days I’ll be writing more in depth about the components I built and how I overcame some of the obstacles of building a “real-time” web-based Juju management system. For now, here are some screenshots of the application running.

Bonus awkward video of me capturing the interface back in July. This was prior to the new queuing service and interface buttons which provide a quicker response time.

When you start to get real popular on the internet there’s usually a a shift or transition when the early adopters either move on, or attempt to resolve the situation, or any one of the number of things that can happen to a site. Since Stack Overflow, SO, is many times larger than Ask Ubuntu but the same kind of site, I think we can look at how they’re solving their “big city” problems and apply it to make AU better.

I’m not surprised that SO used a very scientific method of figuring out how nice they were to people. They gathered up all the comments, shoved them into Mechanical Turk, and then published the results. Stack Overflow is nice, nyah-nyah, science. And the debate continues.

I’d like to think we do a decent job of keeping the snark down on Ask Ubuntu. If someone asks “How do I adjust my clock?” and someone else responds with “Have you googled?” you can be pretty sure that kind of response gets removed in a timely manner. Every day we have users submitting fixes to answers and questions, and about 140,000 visits every day, so we know the content is getting better and more importantly, staying up to date.

The site does have a pretty strict element to it. If your question is a bug report, it gets closed and you’re sent to Launchpad. If you want to run a poll or have a chit chat about Ubuntu it’s closed and you’re sent to the forums, and so on. It’s my strong opinion that this level of focus is a good thing, do one thing and do it well. But on the other hand I can see why some people might think we’re sending them up the creek with no paddle, and after reading some of the bad comments posted on Stack Overflow it reminds me that we should be vigilant to ensure that we’re learning how to continue to grow without letting the quality slip.

So what’s your opinion on Ask Ubuntu? Do you feel like the site is friendly and welcoming to new users and contributors? Have you had a bad or good experience with the site?

On every page load StackTack will fetch the latest information for that question, keeping the data always up-to-date, shifting the burden off of the blog authors back to the original content authors. This technology is now available on the Ubuntu Planet, so all you Ubuntu Community members who wish to use it won’t have your posts lost in scraping!

On the installation screen I selected the “Multiple server install with MAAS” option, selected “Create a new MAAS on this server”, and followed the defaults from there. Toward the end of the install I was given an address through which I could view the MAAS control panel, 10.0.2.5. Needless to say I was pretty excited. Of course, the address didn’t work and I quickly realized that I couldn’t actually access that network. Reviewing the Networking settings for the VM I made the following changes:

Attached to: Bridged Adapter
Name: eth0
Promiscuous Mode: Allow All

I updated each unit to reflect these settings. After the update, I had to re-start the VM and reconfigure MAAS to use the new address. This was done simply with:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure maas

Then I updated the IP to reflect the new IP address within my network. After doing so 192.168.5.27 became my MAAS Master, and http://192.168.5.27/MAAS loaded the control panel!

Taking notice of what the Dashboard says, I ran the following two commands:

sudo maas createsuperuser
sudo maas-import-isos

The first command prompted me for a user, password, and email. The second ran for several minutes downloading and creating different precise images. Once that was finished, my dashboard still showed warnings of impor-isos, but more importantly I was able to log in and see that I had 0 nodes!

This gave me the confidence to push forward. I started the “maas1″ VM to begin the install process. Like before, I selected “Multiple server install with MAAS”. The next screen provided the option to Enlist with the maas-master MAAS Server, so I happily selected that option when the machine suddenly SIGKILLs all processes then powers off. The victory was in the dashboard though, as it now reflected 1 node!

I continued doing this for each of the “maas” VMs until all were registered in the maas-master dashboard. Unfortunately, during installation, of one of the nodes lost my naming scheme (I was trying to do maas-node0, maas-node1, … for each MAAS node) and ended up naming one of the maas2, which threw off the naming for the rest of the nodes. That aside, all of the initial nodes I wanted to enlist did so without any issues.

Now it was time to get some Juju goodness pushing against these machines. The first thing I did was hunt down my MAAS Key. I stumbled through a few sections of the dashboard before landing in the account preferences. I also noticed a section for SSH Keys which I added my public key to (for good measure). I copied my MAAS Key and created the following stanza in my juju environments file (I couldn’t find documentation on the Juju site for MAAS setup but I found this URL from a screenshot of MAAS testing tools, which lead me to the answer).

environments:
  vb-maas:
    type: maas
    maas-server: http://192.168.5.27:80/MAAS
    maas-oauth: "MY:MAAS:KEY"
    admin-secret: super-secret-made-up-admin-key
    default-series: precise

After doing that, boot each VM and the PXE DHCP should find your MAAS Master and set up the VM properly. Each machine will turn off after successful setup and MAAS Dashboard will update. The end result is quite glorious:

Now it’s really time to get Juju working with these lovely MAAS machines! After several non-starts I created a new account in MAAS Dashboard with the same username as my local user and updated Juju environments to use that MAAS Key. After completing that, I issued a bootstrap:

juju bootstrap

and checked the dashboard after the command completed.

The dashboard now shows one of the nodes allocated to Juju for bootstrapping. I had to manually start each VM, as for some reason they don’t respond to Wake On Lan. However, my goal of using Juju to deploy to MAAS was fulfilled. There is definitely room for improvement with the experience, but I have high hopes when we start throwing bare metal at MAAS.

To demonstrate how easy it is to get OMG! Ubuntu! running I’ve recorded the latest deployment on shelr.tv where I created a new environment, bootstrapped it, deployed, then re-pointed the IP address in AWS. What you see in the terminal cast is what’s running OMG! Ubuntu! right now. Compared to traditional deployments, the process is effortless. This terminal cast outlines the deployment of OMG! Ubuntu! from nothing to a running blog. Since it takes about 10 minutes to do the first deploy (imagine having to pull down about 5-10 GB worth of assets, database dumps, etc then import those in to MySQL), I decided to cut there and create this additional short video on how to scale out the deployment.

It’s a fantastic thing. Sure we’ve been rushing around trying all these different methods, but at the end of the day that time was well invested. Now deployments for OMG! Ubuntu! (and WordPress) are easy. In minutes you have a battle ready, tried and true blogging software deployed to the cloud.

Here’s a sample of events and projects that have submitted ads for this Quarter.

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