Posts

Showing posts from 2020

Technical Memo: Convert an ova image to qcow2 format

From Wikipedia of Open Virtualization Format , I learnt that an the ova file is just a tar file of ovf directory. So I went open a Windows 10 Developer Evaluation ova file to see what exist inside it. $ tar -tf WinDev2001Eval.ova WinDev2001Eval.ovf WinDev2001Eval-disk001.vmdk WinDev2001Eval.mf So inside the ova file includes A virtual machine specification definition .ovf file A hash checksum .mf file A disk image in .vmdk image As qemu-img supports vmdk as disk image file, we actually could convert vmdk file to any other format that we like. 1. Convert .vmdk to .img $ qemu-img convert -O raw WinDev2001Eval-disk001.vmdk WinDev2001Eval.img 2. Convert .vmdk to .qcow2    $ qemu-img convert -O qcow2 WinDev2001Eval-disk001.vmdk WinDev2001Eval.qcow2 All supported formats can be confirmed by qemu-img -h The converted qcow2 image could be used to create a new virtual machine using virt-manager. I used to think that .ova file is the file format of Virtual Box (There

Technical Memo: Disk Encryption using Cryptsetup with Vault as Key Management Service

In Linux Operating system, full disk encryption could be achieved by various solutions: encryptfs, dm-crypt, cryptsetup… While a step-by-step setup of disk/partition encryption can be referred from official documentation, integration disk encryption with Key Management solution like Hashicorp Vault is unobvious. Fortunately, there are a package named vaultlocker in Ubuntu Universe repository that ease this integration. I decided to spend my free time to make cryptsetup work with Vault. Notes: A similar request has been made to Cryptsetup but it goes outside of cryptsetup so it was closed. 1. Install Vault As JuJu charm store has working Vault/MySQL charms, Vault deployment is as simple and easy as following commands $ juju deploy percona-cluster $ juju deploy vault $ juju relate vault:shared-db percona-cluster Vault needs to be initialized and unsealed before it can provide its secure services. I followed below steps to initialize Vault $ juju ssh vault/0 $ export VAU

SSH Port Forwarding

Image
Local / Remote port forwarding are powerful features of ssh, yet I am confused of the their usage. Today I saw a great picture explaining in details many options of port forwarding. The author of the accepted answers drew a so great picture that I want to copy here for my own future reference. "a picture worth a thousand words" Source: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/115897/whats-ssh-port-forwarding-and-whats-the-difference-between-ssh-local-and-remot

New NUC

My old desktop becomes sluggish as I deploy multiple test environment on it. As I also use various desktop applications for my daily works on the same desktop machine, sometimes resource insufficiency freeze the all the applications, interfering my work flows. I am always a fan of small low-energy NUC devices so I take this chance to buy a new NUC device solve my resource issue. Before buying new device, I had some considerations for a NUC. Whether it's good time to buy a NUC? If yes, what version should I buy? Whether it works with my 4K Dell Monitor? Whether it generates too much heat? Whether it supports enough resource for my daily work flows (I need a lot of Linux/Windows virtual machines) How I should use  It is a good timing? At CES 2020, Intel announced an impressive NUC 9 and it made me think for a while whether I should wait for the release of this device. However, after checking around for price/performance ratio, I realize that it's not a good time to