How to install an OpenStack env under Slackware
 

I'm on Slackware, and I want to know how to install OpenStack. Because Everything is done for Ubuntu, Fedora, but not for Slackware. It looks like we are not allowed to install an OpenStack cloud environment under Slackware? who knows?
I say OpenStack, but it's the same for Apache CloudStack and so on.

Linux is Ubuntu?

Linux is an operating system kernel, so in that sense Ubuntu is not Linux. Neither is Slackware.

Ubuntu and friends package OpenStack, so that it's easier to install it (still hard to do manually, though worthwhile as a learning experience). If Slackware doesn't have OpenStack packages, it's not OpenStack's fault.

You can just get the software from Git, see https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Getting_The_Code. It will be hard to resolve dependencies and conflicts, though.

Thanks for your reply. What bothers me is that one is forced to change his environment, only to install something. Or, spending 10 years to solve problems of dependencies it will not solve.

The alternative will be to install it in a virtual environnement, however, I do not want to run it in kvm or in virtualbox. Firejail seems to be an intersting alternative like freebsd jails. but I encounter a problem; the creation of a user in it and the option to switch user to sudo.

I am also looking to see if it is possible to install OpenStack under freebsd using linux compability?

The core problem is that the OpenStack installer depends on 'Linux Standard Base' (LSB) which the Slackware developers and users see as a serious bug. I'm also pretty sure none of the BSD communities would even consider adopting it. I am aware of one web site that was created to deal with this issue, but it doesn't appear that they have made much headway. That site is <www.doka.us/>.

I have pretty much the same problem. I have a spare server (Dell R610) and would like to install OpenStack to play around with. But after 23 years using Slackware, I have no interest in using any of the less dependable distributions on it.

Openstack is designed to run on servers, it's an IaaS platform. Slackware, with all due respect, is not a server distribution. If you want to have Slackware working with openstack, the code is open, please feel free to do the packaging. Maybe a few individuals on the planet will actually use it just for laughs.

I beg to differ, but Slackware is a general purpose distribution. The installation scripts are currently optimized for workstations, but with a little careful pruning it works quite well on servers as well. I always do a custom install to remove most of the flotsam and jetsam anyway, so leaving X and a few other extraneous packages out of a server install is quite easy to do. Then pick up a few items from the SlackBuilds <https://slackbuilds.org/> repository and off we go. But then I have seen people at my last employer do enough RHEL and CentOS server installations to know they had to do just as much pruning there if not more. And most of theirs consisted of removing the unwanted packages after the install scripts ran.

No, the root problem is the LSB dependency of OpenStack. There are only a few boutique distributions that were corrupted by that project, but they are the ones pulling OpenStack in that direction. I'm not familiar enough with it to know if it is possible to run it on either Slackware or BSD even if it could be installed.

In theory - yes. But frankly, besides a bunch of ouvert fanboys, who would put it in production (and I mean a serious project, not a LAMP server to play with). Slackware is great for students to start their Linux journey, it's great for folks who want t really understand how the internals work, because the distro forces you to get in there, much like the python syntax forces you to do proper indentation.

you said it - installation__scripts__. I rest my case.


And while you do that, I'll probably finish deploying a hundred RHEL nodes in a real environment. They might lag by maybe a fraction of a second here and there, but they are already in place and working, while you keep tinkering. I love to tinker too, but work is work, and hobbies are hobbies.

In my 10+ years deploying Linux servers, I have maybe had to do "pruning" a few times, and mostly that was due to windows interoperability (like getting samba to work faster than a windows server). And in that time, hardware got so ridiculously powerful, squeezing that extra portion of a percent isn't worth the trouble. Servers should be easy to redeploy, and once you get to tinkering, it's very easy to lose track of every little twist of the screwdriver.
Openstack is very large, very hard to maintain and very very hard to port between distributions. It's a huge effort, porting this monster, and only paying corporations are really capable of providing the manpower to do that. Those corporations will also never use boutique distributions like slackware or gentoo in production, because they are unsupportable at scale.

In short, while you might be a fan, and I have friends who also are fans, heck, I've used slackware myself when I was starting out, in the real world out there, slackware isn't considered a server distribution. You may rant about it, or you may try and port whatever you like to slackware yourself, but it will not see any use either way, just like slackware doesn't see any use in a corporate environment. And openstack isn't really worth deploying anywhere else anyway.

"In my 10+ years deploying Linux servers, I have maybe had to do "pruning" a few times,"

To each his own. The folks I watched were doing PCI systems, and most of that pruning was necessary to clean up security issues so we could accept credit card payments. When I retired we were approaching a million transactions a month.

"Those corporations will also never use boutique distributions like slackware or gentoo in production, because they are unsupportable at scale."

I'm afraid you have that backwards. Slackware is one of the few pure distributions left. It is the kits based on LSB that are the boutique distributions. They were tweaked with superfluous frills and buttons to make them appear more valuable than they really were. Unfortunately, as a marketing ploy it has worked all too well. Even those developers that should have known better have taken the bait. Of course, having a few companies with money to throw at them didn't hurt. Slackware has never had that level of support.

But Slackware is what Patrick and his community want it to be. The only support it really lacks for production use is a cadre of qualified testers and alternate sets of scripts. If that were desired, I'm sure the necessary resources would show up.

and yet, was slackware used?


and it never will. without package management, things become very complex and the amount of actions required to achieve the same goal becomes ridiculous. Not to mention the fact that having to compile things locally is completely unscalable, and doesn't do much for configuration repeatability.

That's all it will ever be - Patrick and community. Look at openstack, it has a huge following achieved in just a handful of years. Slackware has been around since the very start, and it never had a chance to achieve the same kind of following. So it all boils down to whether you want to be out there on the margins, or in the middle of the actual progress. I personally prefer the latter, that's what puts the bread and butter on my table after all.

Here we go again *sigh*
Slackware has a package manager.
I can make my own package repository in 30 seconds by running a script and point the package manager to it.
Using templates I can deploy a slackware server just as easily as a redhat one.
(ie: slackpkg install-template LAMP / slackpkg install-template KVM-node / slackpkg install-template openstack)

Granted: populating the repository with your own custom packages and building the templates is not trivial... but you only have to do it once and deploy X times.

ON TOPIC
Nobody bothered to package openstack for Slackware yet, but that is not openstack's fault.

updates? backports? QA? support? I can (and do) use an untested distro on my laptop, for the sake on having new packages, but that would be suicidal in an enterprise environment. And to stop the upcoming comment - no, you cannot test every package that comes into your distribution properly, you simply don't have the resources to do that, with the amount of stuff happening in and on Linux these days, that's a full time job for a few hundreds of professional testers.

And nobody will, because there simply isn't any requirement for that. Bring in a couple of companies the size of AT&T demanding slackware support, and then something will appear, definitely. Openstack makes sense in large corporate environments, I'm talking hundreds of servers at the very least, and I seriously doubt anyone will ever see slackware, gentoo, or any such niche distribution in such an environment.

Just to clarify: rmcconnell didn't say that... I did :hattip:

Maybe you can afford the latest hardware, but my social security check doesn't go that far. I have to depend on a few hand-me-downs and any used equipment that I can afford, and none of them have all that many resources. So both disk space and memory are critical resources that must be preserved.

Ok, if openstack can only be used in that environment, what would you recommend for the family or small business owner that wants to set up a private cloud server?

That's perfectly fine, but it has nothing to do with software like openstack, which is supposed to span hundreds and thousands of powerful servers.

easy. But first you have to tell me what it is you are trying to achieve, leaving fancy marketing words aside. You want to run VMs on demand? Be able to automate VM creation and removal? How many hosts are you trying to manage?

Ahh, now you are asking technical questions that I won't know how to answer until after I have played with a few servers. This brings us back to a typical chicken and egg problem. How can I answer them without any experience, but how can I gain that experience without knowing any of the answers?