Winter term is here! For some that may bring excitement, and for others I’m sure it will bring some dread. But in any case it’s time for the club to get active again! Last term we worked really hard on getting a virtualized infrastructure set up for easy use by our club members. Unfortunately we spent so much time setting it up that we didn’t have any good use cases or scenarios for it!

So the goal for this term is to try and incorporate our resources into everything we do. There is a whole lot that can be done with OpenStack and that means there’s a lot you can learn by using our resources instead of having to procure your own. This term we’re going to focus on networking again with a better look at routing and larger networks. We have an awesome event in the works for the end of the term and we want to get you all thinking about that and how you can participate in it. I don’t want to give out too much information just yet, but I will tell you that it’s going to be a “WAN” party 😉

I also want to push for more inclusion this term. Last term we were often finding low attendance to events and meetings so this term I want to try and schedule events and meetings to better fit everyone’s schedules. If you have any ideas on how to get more people to participate please let me know!

We’re looking forward to seeing you all again and we hope you all had a fantastic break! Keep your eyes open on the forum for the time and place of the first meeting this term and we hope to see you there!

On 12/01/2017 the OpenStack console servers Nova-NoVNCProxy was made live on the network for our tenant use. The ability to use the console services allows for VMs on internal private subnets to be used as it removes the need for a pure SSH connection to the VM.

Testing of VMs on subnets not connected to the public interface revealed an issue in the way the current OpenStack installation handles networking with VMs. It is currently not possible to set a fixed IP address for a VM on any given subnetwork. This makes it difficult to set up and experiment with routing and networking within the cluster.

We will be working on finding a solution to this problem so that virtual networking will function as would be expected. Unfortunately we have no timeline for such a fix as the fix is not yet known to us. I am currently exploring the possibility of switching to OpenVSwitch as the network driver instead of LinuxBridge but so far I do not have any results.

I sure didnt! So how about a blog for the IT Club! The forum is nice and all, but this will be a cool way for the officer team to give some longer updates about what’s going on in the club. Plus it looks much more official since we’re actually under the oregonstate.edu domain! I was considering setting up a blog at the same site the forum is but never got around to it. This is much nicer though so lets call this home for our blogging purposes!