Circumference: OpenStack Progress with Network Booting

Circumference is a miniaturised datacentre-in-a-box, complete with programmable power distribution and sequencing, instrumentation, cooling, networking, and a switchable remote console — all packaged in custom-designed desktop enclosures which eliminate cable clutter and give you complete control over the hardware inside.

Chris Dent has a blog post about netbooting the Circumference.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/ground-electronics/circumference
https://groundelectronics.com/products/circumference/

In my previous posting on the Circumference I said that I wanted to get the eight Raspberry Pi nodes to netboot from the front end processor so I could more easily manage the nodes on which I wanted to install nova-compute. This post provides a very quick update on those explorations. Newer Pi 3 B have firmware that can allow them to netboot without any SD card in place, but it requires a fair bit of set up. I was struggling to make headway, never seeing bootpc packets from the nodes. Turns out a newer firmware is needed. Andrew Back, from Ground Electronics the company building the Circumference, pointed to a useful cookbook blog post, Network Booting a Raspberry Pi 3 from an Ubuntu Server, that includes pointers to the new firmware. That got me a bit further. I’m now able to see some nodes, sometimes choosing to send bootpc packets and otherwise talking to the network.[…]

https://anticdent.org/circumference-25-netbooting.html
https://anticdent.org/circumference-25-beta.html
https://www.crowdsupply.com/ground-electronics/circumference/updates/openstack-progress-with-network-booting

 

OSR on Windows IoT on Rasberry PI 3

Peter at OSR has a new blog post about using Embedded Windows — now called Windows IoT — on a Rasberry PI3, with a lot of advice for embedded Windows developer using this beta platform.

[…] You can’t connect WinDbg to the RPI 3 via the network.  You have to use the serial port.  To be successful in this endeavor, you’ll need a super-secret TTL to USB Serial Port cable (this one from Adafruit works just dandy).  […]

Secrets of Using Win10 IoT Core on the RPI 3 (and staying sane)

If you do Windows, and have not looked at OSR’s online resources, it is worth a look, they have some tools that beat SysInternals, and the NTDev mailing list is probably the best public source of NT experienced developers, and one of the few places outside MSDN blogs that Microsoft developers publicly post technically useful information:
http://www.osronline.com/section.cfm?section=27
http://www.osronline.com/cf.cfm?PageURL=showlists.cfm?list=NTDEV