Episode: 2941
Title: HPR2941: Server Basics 107: Minishift and container management
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2941/hpr2941.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 13:39:20

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It's Monday 11th of November 2019, and this is HPR episode 2941 entitled, Server Basics
107, MiniShift and Container Management.
It is the 230th anniversary show of Klatu, and it's about 39 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag and the summary is, Klatu introduces MiniShift, a local test environment
for a single node cloud.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash
donate.
You're listening to Hacker Public Radio, my name is Klatu in this episode.
I want to continue my server basics series.
This is 107 in the series covering container management with Kubernetes, or thereabouts.
A stu-t listeners might notice that this isn't directly really a topic about server basics.
This is something really specifically about server less basics.
There are less being sort of a buzzword right now, implying that there are no servers that
there is, but the cloud, of course, that's also not true because the cloud runs on something,
and whether you call them servers or not, that's what they are.
Their server running a cloud is just that there are lots of servers involved.
This episode is covering, and the previous episode, I decided to cover these technologies
because realistically, if you go out and get a job as a SysAdmin somewhere, then one of
the tasks that you are going to encounter on the job, you're going to be expected to
be able to do, is to probably deal with infrastructure of some kind of cloud, whether it's a hybrid
cloud that's mostly hosted on-site across several different servers, or whether it's a globally
network system of servers, or something that you rent somewhere, whatever it might be,
there's going to be an expectation that you can manage that kind of infrastructure.
The problem, up until very recently, with that expectation is that there's really, there
was no realistic way for a new user to ever learn the skill, which, of course, traditionally,
at least for me, has been a huge strength of Linux and open-source software in general,
because that you're able to learn the things that you could ultimately get paid for at home.
You could just learn it on your own time for free, for zero dollars, and then you could
go into A Workforce and get paid for that knowledge.
It's a huge, huge advantage.
I'm speaking from experience, it has been an advantage for me, so I think that it's important
to maintain that level of zero barrier to entry, and that's been a problem with the,
quote-unquote, cloud technologies up until fairly recently.
You could rent some space on a proprietary cloud platform, and they would charge you
by bandwidth or something like that, and it was all very confusing, and it wasn't zero
dollars.
And there are a couple of clouds out there that will offer you space and time on their,
on their system for, in exchange for money.
There is one from Oracle right now, not that I'm recommending Oracle, but Oracle, supposedly,
has an entry-level cloud platform that you can sign up for, and they've got a bunch
of restrictions on it, but it does have kind of a gooey front end that you can play around
with stuff through your browser.
With all of that said, none of these options are ideal, and if you are just some random
person seeking to either get into technology or seeking to upskill in technology so that
you can get better work, what do you do if you don't have access to a big,
fancy cloud?
Well, I can get you about 60% of the way there, with either a thing called MiniCube or
MiniShift.
Now, these are two separate projects, and the one I'm going to cover in this episode is
MiniShift, because it's the one that I have more experience with, and I think it's a
pretty easy way, pretty easy way to get started with this stuff.
In the previous episode, in 106, I was talking about containers, and how containers are
defined by namespaces, and how these namespaces protect processes, or a group of processes
from sort of being aware of the environment upon which they're actually running.
I talked about how that concept is part of this whole container idea, this concept that
is for this system, by which we can run a sort of an embedded OS, like an operating system,
on a computer with an operating system, and it's a hugely powerful thing, whether or not
you approve of the design concept is more or less irrelevant at this point, because
they've kind of taken off, at least for right now, they do seem to be the method by which
people have chosen to deploy applications that need to scale quickly and dynamically.
The answer is literally to just spin up another container somewhere, or another set of container
somewhere, to handle additional traffic or additional activity.
If you did something fail within that container, then the container crashes or stops and
relaunches, picking up more or less where it left off.
It does this by ensuring that there's no data being stored inside that container.
This is a very confusing concept to most people who are used to maintaining a server, or
even a virtual machine, where that thing, the computer, whether it's real or virtual,
contains the user data and the data and the configurations and the history and everything
that has ever happened in that space.
But in a container, the idea is that nothing is contained in the container except the
stuff that needs to run, just sort of the logic of the program itself.
Everything that it needs to run in a certain configuration or data that it needs to process
is stored external of the container.
The result is that you have the set of servers with a distributed file system across each
server, and they are running little instances of just enough operating systems in a little
container that run applications and then process data.
When there needs to be more of that, then another server in that cloud maybe pops into
existence or rather comes to life and generates or launches another instance of the container
that you need in order to process all the data that's coming into your cloud.
When that's all processed and done, those containers die off and that server sort of sits dormant
until something like that happens again.
And maybe it's a completely different container that that happens on, but it's a very it's
a dynamic environment where applications being run on a miniature, tiny operating system
instance gets spawned and killed off as needed.
When you have something like that, there is a need, people have found, to be able to
monitor what's going on, for instance, how many containers of a specific, how many instances
of a specific container are running right now, how is the latency between the synchronization
of files on the file system, how's the RAM doing and so on.
So there needs to be some way to manage all of these resources to look into them, maybe
even to give developers access to some portion of that so that when they are developing, they
can fire up a new container when they need rather than when the cloud thinks they need
it or maybe they need to simulate traffic in order to test the cloud, whatever.
We need some kind of interface into that.
The interface into that is called Kubernetes, which is a Greek word derived from or rather
Kubernetes is derived from a Greek word for the concept of pilot PILOT, PILOT of a ship.
So Kubernetes is an open source technology designed to orchestrate, as they say, containers.
It is naturally just a command line application.
It's a command that you run from a terminal to spawn and kill and monitor containers.
You can get started with Kubernetes, just with pure Kubernetes.
You can do that.
However, it's a little bit cumbersome to do serious tasks exclusively with the Kubernetes
command.
For that reason, there are several front-ends for Kubernetes, both terminal-based and as
GUI applications.
Now the one that I've used because of my day job is OpenShift.
OpenShift is essentially a GUI front-end for Kubernetes, which is an orchestrator of containers.
The advantage to OpenShift is that it is an open platform based on a project called OKD.
Imagine stands for Open Kubernetes, something maybe, I don't know.
Anyway, it's based on this thing called OKD, which is an open source operating system
if you will for the cloud.
Now that's not strictly true, but if we consider the cloud as the platform, which in a way
is true, right?
The cloud has to run on something.
To build an open source cloud, you would have a bunch of computers, and on each computer
you would install an open source operating system, maybe Fedora or Debian, whatever you
like.
On that operating system, you would install a distributed file system like Seth, that's
CEPH, or theoretically Gluster, but I've heard Seth is kind of the way to go.
On that file system, you would install components of OpenStack, including the GUI interface
called OpenShift.
OpenShift would be the web admin panel that people would log into to monitor the status
of the cloud, and to look at how many containers they have running, and so on.
Now that's a completely open source cloud, and it would be very cool to have one, and
it would be fun to try out, and you could do this.
You could buy a bunch of pies, and have a little pie cloud or something, and they would
be spinning up things as needed, and doing all kinds of different activities.
You could try that, but realistically speaking, it's going to be difficult to come up with
an appropriately sized, personal cloud, by which I mean the file system, for instance,
follow, for failover protection, for failure, to make sure that it's always available, and so on.
It needs a certain number of nodes, so that it can synchronize between servers, and in theory,
you can have a two node setup, but it's not recommended, and it's a little bit unrealistic.
You could do it for testing, I guess, really, it ought to be at least three, and then preferably a
lot more nodes for proper synchronization and robustness. The likelihood of someone learning
Kubernetes just by first setting up a personal cloud is rather low. That's a demanding gateway
to get through. What a couple of people have developed is a thing called mini-shift or mini-cube,
but again, I'm going to focus on mini-shift because it's the one that I know. They've developed mini-shift,
which is a quasi-virtualized, private, single node cloud, so it's completely useless in
production. You would never use mini-shift in real life. The advantage to it is that it mimics
down to the last little icon, I mean, it just mimics completely an actual open-shift environment,
and open-shift, again, is one of the interfaces to a cloud that you will encounter in the real world.
I have several friends working at lots of different types of organizations, financial and
artistic, and they're using open-shift there to manage their resources. So you'll definitely
encounter it. It's not the only one out there. There are others, and I guess you could probably
go to that Oracle cloud one thing where they're offering free entry levels, and you could sign
up for that, and you would get dumped into their web admin, and there would be a different web
UI, although honestly, I kind of glanced at it, and it looks really, really similar to the
open-shift OKD mini-shift thing. I don't know what they're running, but it looked pretty familiar
to me. You could go to AWS, and you'd find a different interface. You could go to Azure,
and you'd find a different one. So there are different ones out there, but the idea is that,
or the ideas that they contain are going to be pretty similar. I mean, the tasks that are
involved often are not dissimilar. So in other words, I'm saying, if you learned mini-shift,
you'd be set up then to go straight into work on open-shift, and potentially you'd have a
leg up if you were to go working on some other non-open cloud platform as well,
because you'd just be that much more familiar with common tasks involved in making these things work.
So how do you get mini-shift? Well, the first thing you need to do is make sure that you've got
the ability to run mini-shift on your computer. You probably do in this day and age,
but you want to do the whole eGrep-dash-only-matching-dash-word-readjx,
and then single-quote-vmx-pipe-svm-close-single-quote. So that's a red-redgex for looking for either
VMX or SVM in-slash-proc-slash-cpu-info. Intel CPUs use the VMX virtualization AMD-CPUs return SVM.
So as long as you see something returned with that query, then you're good to go.
Your computer's capable of running, of doing this task. Like I say, in the modern day and age,
I think it would be rare to find a computer that doesn't have those technologies.
I mean, at least it would be rare to find a computer that you reasonably believed would be
capable of doing like modern virtualization stuff. Okay, so once you've got all that,
you need the KVM stack installed. KVM is of course the Linux kernel-based virtual machine.
It is in mainline kernel now, so it's pretty common. You may already have it installed.
You do want, you probably have it installed, but you do want the Qemoo or KMU, or however you say
that word, Qemoo-KVM packages. Whatever your distribution calls, the Qemoo-KVM portion,
you want to make sure that that's installed. It might be bundled together with Qemoo and it might
just be a big monolithic package. It may not be just checked to make sure that it's either available
or installed and you'll be good. Okay, so once you've got that, you want to enable the virtualization
demon, so that would be probably pseudo-system-CTL-enable-dash-now-lib-vert-d. It might be something
might be called something different on your system on my Slackware system. The command is not
a system-CTL command. It's a slash at c slash rc.d slash rc.lib-vert-space-start, but just look
into how to startlib-vert and start that, enable that to run on your system.
You also want to add yourself to thelib-vert group. To do that, you can do a pseudo-user-mod-lowercase-a-capital-glib-vert,
and then your user name. Clat 2. Use the new group command to log into the new group by running
new group that's in EWGRP, space-space-lib-vert, and then if you run the group's command, you should
see that your user, your login, has been updated with you included in thelib-vert group.
You need to do that in order to interact with the MiniShift or actually the OKD tool chain
that's supporting MiniShift. Finally, you're going to need to install some Docker tools. Now,
we're not actually directly using Docker in this process, but there are still some tools to
parse configuration files or to look at definitions. I think even to run some binaries that you do
need to install, this is probably subject to change realistically. Docker has gone through a lot of
changes certainly since episode 1522 when I first talked about it, but even just within the past
year or so, it's undergone a lot of changes. I'm not 100% clear on the future of Docker. It seems
like the whole container thing is taking a wild swing towards the truly open source, whereas Docker
has taken a wild swing to not being as open source. It's quite confusing if you go to their page
to their website, but for now Docker is sort of the de facto default for a lot of the container
images and commands. You will need to install that. Installing just Docker machine is something you
can do from from GitHub. It's curl dash dash location and then HTTPS colon slash get hub.com slash
Docker slash machine slash releases slash download. Obviously this is current as of this recording. It's
probably outdated by the time you hear this slash lowercase v for version 0.16.1 slash Docker
dash machine dash linux with a capital L dash back tick you name dash I close back tick redirect
to till the slash download slash Docker dash machine. Then you want to mark that executable. So
Chmod plus X till the slash download slash Docker machine. And then you want to probably move that
well, you certainly want to move that some location in your path. So if you do an echo,
dollar sign path capital P a t h then you'll see your path. Move this this Docker machine executable
to somewhere in that path. I usually put it in slash user slash local slash bin. You could maybe
put it in slash opt if that's in your path. You could at as a last resort put it in slash user slash
bin. It's up to you. And in addition to Docker machine, you're going to need the KVM
driver for Docker. So that's a separate thing that you need to download. And that one I can't
be quite as explicit as to how to get that. You'll want to go to the get hub site of D Hilt Gen
and look at the Docker machine dash KVM releases and get the one appropriate for your distribution.
So that's github.com slash D H I L T G N slash Docker dash machine dash KVM.
The process of of installing it such as it is is pretty similar. You just mark it executable
and then you move it to somewhere in your path. And that's usually Docker dash machine dash driver
dash KVM is I think the expected name of that of that executable. So now you're set up.
You're set up to install mini shift. And mini shift is distributed. It is a self-contained
pre-compiled binary. You can go get the source code and compile it yourself. But it's written
and go or a lot of it is. So you need to full go development of environment. So you're welcome
to do that. It's at github.com slash mini shift. But if you don't want to do that then you can
just install it yourself from their pre-compiled binary that they release. And again you get that
from github.com slash mini shift. Just go to the releases, look at the latest release and grab that.
It'll download a tar file at .tgz. You can untar that and once again move it to some some
place in your path. So now you've got mini shift installed. All you need to do is start it.
Starting it is a rather manual process. And I think it's okay. I mean you could write I could
imagine writing a desktop file for this. But I feel like that would be almost overkill. And you
probably want to see the output anyway. So I've never I've never bothered with that. I've always
just started it from the terminal and just set that terminal aside while it was running. So to
start it you do mini shift, space, start. You'll see a bunch of output. It gives you a lot of
different sort of status updates of what it's checking to see is true or valid and it runs all
of these processes. And then finally it tells you that that that it's all started. It's it's
open shift server has started and the server is accessible over a web console at some address.
Let's call it 192.168.168.168 colon 8443 slash console. If you open a web browser and navigate
that IP address. And again it will tell you the IP address. The standard port is 8443.
The path is slash console. So it'll be some variation of that. But it will tell you that in
the terminal output where to find this console. You log into or you open a web browser, you navigate
to that page and you'll see a login screen. Now you will probably get an SSL certificate warning
because the SSL certificate being used by this mini shift instance is a self generated SSL
certificate. So accept the the warning or ignore the warning or whatever you need to do to get past
that. In real life you would change to a self sign certificate and and distribute that to the
people that that want that that need access or you would get a CI a CI sign certificate or whatever.
But for this obviously for your own machine it doesn't really it's not that big of a deal.
So click through that and and then sign in. And the way that you'll sign in is using the
username developer and the password developer. The mini shift landing page that you'll see straight
away at least at the time of this recording. Obviously everything subject to change. I mean
they're developing it. I'm sure all the time. But by default and I think generally you'll get to
a landing page that encourages you to get started with something. And since your login is a developer
it assumes that your workflow is going to mirror a typical developer workflow.
This is a pretty good way to get a feel for what mini shift is all about. So you may as well go
down that path at least initially. Especially since without anything existing in your mini shift
cloud there's not a whole lot to monitor or adjust. So you want to create something for yourself
if only so that you can then imagine what might happen in the real world. You would have these pods
running these little containers running and generating and spawning and scaling up and so on.
So in order to see that in action you kind of need to create something. So you can click on
create project pretty much right after logging in and then enter the name for a project. Maybe
a hacker public radio for instance. Click create and then click the project name and the project
list to enter its overview panel. And a project is not a container. It is simply a
it's an interface or a wrapper I guess around expected applications. For instance let's say that
there's a project that you that you're working on or that someone is working on on your cloud and
you need to as part of the project is that they need a web server to be running.
Well luckily there are pre-built projects for that so you could browse you can click the
browse catalog button in the interface in the the mini shift interface. And look around and
you'll you'll find a basic engine X template. That opens a configuration window. You can click try
sample repository link to auto fill out all the fields. It fills it with demo content from open
shifts project page on GitHub. And so once that's all filled out then you click create again.
And now you've got a sample application that runs engine X.
Now it won't always be that easy because presumably at some point someone will be developing
a project that does not exist yet so that doesn't have a pre-built template for you. But
just to get something going that was a pretty that's a pretty simple process. So if you
if you if you create a project then you can create applications within that project and all
it you know if you want just to learn you can use pre-built applications.
Okay so once you've got a sample application like this engine X1 for instance then you can close
the the the window and click the overview tab on the left of the web console. You'll see the
the toolbar on the left. It's expandable. Get used to that toolbar. That's kind of the place
that you're going to keep going back to frequently. In the overview panel you can click the title of
your application to view its progress and and the state of that of that application. So I mean
you have to wait for it to build or to download the the template and then to build it into what they
call a pod. But once that's done then it'll you'll see an overview overview panel. It'll tell you
where to find the application. So for instance to to go see the the it works page or whatever it is
on engine X. I haven't seen it in a while but that that that start spade that start page that a
web server provides so that you know that it's running. In order to see that it'll give you the URL
it'll give you the URL of that start page so you can go take a look at it and confirm that it's
working. And at this point I think you'll probably see like if you've installed and you've done
everything that I've said just set up a sample application you'll kind of get a feel for the
interface and the thing is that you would maybe normally be looking for. For instance how many
instances of this web server are running right now? How could we scale it up? How could we add more
instances if maybe there's a spike in traffic? Now obviously in real life the administrator wouldn't
be the one literally monitoring the traffic and scaling up the application with frantic mouse clicks
as more people log in that it's not how it would work. But being able to log in and look at that
and see and then do a manual override maybe as needed that's all useful information. And obviously the
toolbar on the left is is well worth exploring. Another thing worth exploring is what's actually
happening behind the scenes. So this is the fancy GUI that a lot of people will see at their day job
but somebody is looking at this thing from a different angle and the gateway to
everything that the web console is doing is a command called OC. Now many shift ships with a
with a command to and I think OpenShift does as well now that I'm saying that. But there's a command to
set up your environment so that that that many shift knows or rather OC knows where where your cloud
data is stored. So you can see this for yourself by running many shift space OC dot ENV to actually
implement it to apply it to your environment to an eVal space backtick many shift space OC-ENV
backtick. Then you can log in as the admin user. OC, space login, space dash U, space system
colon admin. Keep in mind on a real OpenShift server and an environment you'd have you'd be
logging in with LDAP or OAuth or something like that. But this is a hyper local test environment.
It knows that it's a test environment so direct sort of default passwords and everything is
just it's fine. Okay, so we're going to do an OC space get space users and that shows you all
the users on your Open on your many shift environment and you'll find that there's one user and
they're called developer. That's that default user that we just used to log into the web console.
You can also view this user's projects with OC space project and you can create new projects
like OC space, new dash project space, GNU world order, dash dash display, dash name equals GNU world
order, dash dash description equals quote GNU world order, close quote. It's a lot of the same
data for a lot of different options but I couldn't think of anything off the top of my head so
there you go. You could also create new applications. So the new project is the thing that you
did when you first logged into the web console to create a new thing, a place for applications to
live. To create the application itself you can just do OC space, new dash app and then the location
of the application of the application get repository and you know as usual you'd kind of have to
know the environment and know what you want to do. There are sample ones online.
You can use those. It's like if you go to github.com slash S-C-L-O-R-G.
There are a couple of sample projects there. There's a couple. I think that one is actually
linked from OpenShift get hub but if you go to OpenShift get hub you'll you'll find sample
applications and that's it's the same stuff that you looked at when you installed engine X as an
application. So the OC command in other words is the terminal command version pretty much of mini
shift or OpenShift or OKD. Trying both of them kind of getting used to both of them is not a
bad idea and that's about all I can say about mini shift. It's something that you should try if
you're interested in getting started with the cloud because it's a great example of an
open source interface for cloud for container management and orchestration and for monitoring too.
I mean there's a bunch of stuff out there obviously that can hook into OpenShift but OpenShift
is a really great or mini shift as well. It's a really great place to start locally to get a
feel for what exactly would go into managing these sorts of things. Click around, learn new tricks,
go to learn.openShift.com or whatever it is yeah try.no learn.openShift.com I think or .io.
One of those two you can kind of get a feel for common tasks that would that would be something
that an admin would have to do. It's the way to learn this stuff. So hopefully that helps you
sort of break through a lot of the buzzwords and confusion about what exactly the cloud is and how
it exists and how it runs. The idea that there are open source and hybrid clouds out there that
do not rely on imaginary server farms that are owned by corporations that you can never quite
put your finger on. Don't do that. Learn mini shift, learn OpenShift, learn Kubernetes.
That's the way to get started on the cloud, the open source way.
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