Devstack installation

1) Why I need Devstack :

   Being new to openstack and wanting to contribute to one of our company openstack/opensource project Jumpgate ..lead me to conclude that to even make sense of the issues posted on Jumpgate is first need to see how openstack works .not sure if i mentioned earlier but i am a visual-kind of person ..i prefer tools with GUIs and learn by seeing and i love designing/creating/improving UIs  for the same reason.

anyways so after reading all about openstack and its  major components I thought it might be time to  see it in action ..

If you have not yet gone through the basics ..i would reccommend you do that

there are many resources .. search online by "new to openstack" "learn openstack" e.t.c
sad thing is there are too many :)
here are some i can provide
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack
http://ilearnstack.com/2013/04/23/introduction-to-openstack-2/
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Main_Page



after these links i guess you might be ready to see how exactly it works ..

I started out by installing nova and jumpgate ( since this is the project i was interested in contributing to )  using these instructions :-
http://bodenr.blogspot.com/2014/03/managing-openstack-softlayer-resources.html


but Jumpgate is still in progress .. many things are not ready .. to make sense of the issues/errors thrown e.t.c i first needed to see a working model .. hence the devstack installation made sense .. since using that i will be able to see how its supposed to work !!!

for devstack installation i went with these instructions :

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git
git clone https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack.git
cd devstack
cp samples/local.conf  local.conf
./stack.sh

now watch out for password prompting ( I left them all blank :)) 

I ran into several issues in these simple steps ..

1) don't run it as root ..it will create problems 

2) if you run into permissions issue :- 

 log in as the stack user and run ./stack.sh 

  To do so, I had to call
  sudo visudo
  and add
  stack ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
  to the file. Then rerun stack.sh as stack and its working.

3) if you get any curl problems like this Curl SSL Certification error then 

   upgrade curl 

   there are some version of curl and devstack which are not compatible with each other

    mine was curl 7.22

4)  then i ran into "keystone did not start"

    what solved the problem was reboot the machine and run it again

    cd devstack/ 

    ./unstack.sh

    ./clean.sh

    ./stack.sh 

some links i followed are:- 

http://devstack.org/

https://ask.openstack.org/en/questions/

http://sayalilunkad.github.io/posts/Devstack/

For using devstack from here on (after installation succeeds ..) ...look out for next post

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