My laptop has somewhat less than 1/2 the grunt of my desktop at home, but I prefer to work on it as I can go sit in the sun etc, very hard to do that with a mini tower case

However, running everything through ssh to another machine makes editing and iterating more clumsy; I need to do agent forwarding etc – not terribly hard, but not free either, particularly when I travel, I need to remember to sync my source trees back to my laptop. So I prefer to live on my laptop and use my desktop for compute power.

I had a couple of Juju charms I wanted to investigate, but I needed enough compute power to make my laptop really quite warm – so I thought, its time to update my local cloud provider from Eucalyptus to Openstack. This was easy enough, until I came to run Juju. Turns out that Juju’s commands really want to talk to the public DNS name of the instance (in order to SSH tunnel a connection to Zookeeper).

But! Openstack returns DNS names like ‘Server-3′, and if you think about a home network, its fairly rare to have a local DNS server *anyway*, so putting a suffix on names like that won’t help at all: you either need to use a DNS naming provider (openstack ships with an LDAP provider, which adds even more complexity), and configure your clients to know how to find it, or you need to use the public IP addresses (which default to the FlatNetwork, which is routable within a home LAN by simply adding a route to 10.0.0.0/8 to your wifi interface). Adding to confusion, some wifi routers fail to forward avahi messages, which is a) terrible and b) breaks the only obvious way of doing no-config local DNS .

So, I did some yak shaving this morning. Turns out other folk have already run into this and filed a Juju bug and a supporting txaws bug. The txaws bug was fixed, but just missed the release of Precise. Clint Byrum is going to SRU it this week though, so we’ll have it soon. I’ve put a patch up to address the Juju side, which is now pending review. Running the two together works very happily for me. \o/