openstack in EPEL status

[Pádraig Brady]

I've been looking recently at getting the diablo release of openstack
running on RHEL6.2 beta with support from EPEL.
The current status is that I have nova and glance services running
and passing very basic tests. I'm using 2 packages not yet in EPEL though.

 python-webob: 0.9.6 in RHEL6.2, 1.0.8 in F1[56]
 python-sqlalchemy: 0.5.5 in RHEL6.2, 0.6.8 in F15

The RHEL6.2 versions of these packages are too old
to support openstack. Now it's not practical to update those
for RHEL6.2 and I've requested consideration for RHEL6.3.
In the meantime I think it's probably best to have parallel
installable versions of those packages in EPEL, given EPEL's
mandate of not updating RHEL packages:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/GuidelinesAndPolicies
So we might have a python-webob10 package in EPEL,
and adjust the openstack packages accordingly.
There is precedent for this in packages like python-sphinx10

I will consider again adjusting openstack to be directly
compatible with the RHEL6.2 versions of these packages,
but on first look, that approach seems quite invasive.

Another outstanding task which should be completed soon
is to support libguestfs as a means to update guest images.
openstack uses NBD currently but that is unavailable in RHEL6
as it was supplanted by iSCSI. NBD is a little hacky anyway
so this should be a better approach:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/719325

To test these changes I'm using the instructions from:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-10-20_OpenStack_Test_Day
Some config changes were required over that done for Fedora 16:

 SELinux
  This works in F16 but I'm not worrying about it for the moment in RHEL
    # setenforce 0
    # sed -i 's/^SELINUX=enforcing/SELINUX=permissive/' /etc/selinux/config

 qpidd and matahari
  These services may be enabled by default in some RHEL6.2 releases,
  and conflict at the TCP port level at least. I guess we could
  put rabbitmq on a different port, and there was talk about
  qpidd being used over amqpd, but for now I did:
    for svc in matahari-broker matahari-host matahari-network \
               matahari-service matahari-sysconfig qpidd; do
      service $svc stop
      chkconfig $svc off
    done

 nova-manage db sync
   I needed to run the above before I could start openstack-nova-* services.
   TODO: check whether that needs to be run at install time.

 There are issues with RHEL6 running VM running VMs themselves,
 which was one of the test modes for the F16 test day above.
 For now all testing is done on bare metal.

cheers,
Pádraig.