Dave Tucker

2014-2019: In Summary

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It's been a while since I last updated my blog. As I'd like to share more in 2020, I thought that a good first post might be to update you all on what I've been working on the last 5 years.

Running a Pelican Blog on Docker Cloud with Let's Encrypt

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It's 2017 and my blog was starting to look a little dated so I decided it was time for a face-lift. While I was at it, I overhauled the way I deploy my blog too.

Data-Driven RESTful API Testing for Java

Wed, 04 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post is a Zombie that I'm resurrecting from my drafts. I"m not doing any Java these days, but hopefully this post might be useful to somebody

In my quest to get better code coverage for the OVSDB project in OpenDaylight I started to look at increasing coverage for the REST API. It's pretty difficult to test this in an efficient way (lines of code) and frameworks like Robot would have been easier to use. The disadvantage with using an external test framework is that code coverage (using a plugin like JaCoCo) would not be logged. Therefore I harnessed my Junit-Jitsu and found a solution that lives in the JVM

Taming Netlink

Mon, 12 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Netlink is a Linux Kernel interface that is used to talk Networking between Kernel processes, or from userland to Kernel processes. This post documents how I tamed Netlink and make working with it in Golang easier.

Experimenting with Kernel-powered Open vSwitch and Docker

Thu, 28 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I've been thinking about running Docker on CoreOS and Project Atomic lately... While the deployment model would be pretty different to what we are used to, I have 50% of the work already done in docker-ovs so I was interested to see if my containers would work on a system with the Open vSwitch kernel module loaded...

Is SDN API directionality absurd?

Mon, 25 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was finally catching up on a number of posts I'd saved to read later and noticed the prevalent use of "Northbound" and "Southbound". I'm now starting to question whether these terms are necessary or accurate.

Why I gave up Networking for Software

Mon, 25 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

It's now been 3 months since I transitioned from Networking to Software. This is a retrospective piece on my reasons for giving up on Networking.

Fun with Fig (and Docker)

Sun, 24 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I first heard of Fig when I read about Docker acquiring Orchard, a container hosting service, back in July. Last week I finally got to read a little more about it and it just so happens it is the missing piece of the puzzle in a couple of projects that I am working on right now!

Response - Do We Need To Redefine Open?

Sun, 24 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Tom Hollingsworth wrote a great post on whether or not we need to redefine "Open". My response was too long for a comment, so here it is!

Building a router with Open vSwitch

Tue, 19 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

As part of my work in OpenDaylight, we are looking at creating a router using Open vSwitch... Why? Well OpenStack requires some limited L3 capabilities and we think that we can handle those in a distributed router.

Rolling back to Maven 3.0.X on OSX (Homebrew)

Wed, 13 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The current version of Maven in Homebrew at the time of writing is 3.2.2

This is great... unless one of the plugins in your project doesn't support it and then you have to downgrade :(

Fortunately it's not too painful

:::bash
brew uninstall maven
brew tap homebrew/versions
brew install maven30

@dave-tucker

Creating a Vagrant base box for RHEL with Bento

Tue, 03 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I <3 the Opscode Bento project. I use the Amazon S3 hosted images for pretty much all of my Vagrant boxes. When I started to use RHEL, I didn't want to make an exception... Fortunately Bento allows you to build your own RHEL, OSX or Windows boxes using Packer. This is how I built my RHEL 6.4 x64 box, but this process should work for any other box you want to build manually...

My pinboard bookmarks for 17 May 2014

Sat, 17 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Things of note that were discovered on the web this week.

OpFlex - is the abstraction in the right place?

Mon, 28 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

It's been a few weeks since Cisco announced OpFlex and I've just finished gathering my thoughts...

SSH for Python - In search of API perfection

Sun, 16 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

My mission is simple: Establish an SSH connection to a device and run some commands in as few lines as possible. The contenders? Paramiko, Spur and Fabric.

NETCONF, YANG, RESTCONF and NetOps in an SDN World

Sat, 15 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I've had some great discussion with the OpenDaylight OVSDB team around NETCONF, YANG, RESTCONF and what network operations will look like in an SDN world. This post summarizes where my head is at on this subject.

Installing KVM, Libvirt and Open vSwitch on Fedora

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In my NetOps to DevOps Training Plan I mentioned installing KVM, Libvirt and Open vSwitch. I did this a few weeks ago and documented it to produce this tutorial. My motivation was to replace my VMware environment at home with something Open Source. I am also a strong believer in "eat your own dog food" and as a lot of the work I am doing in the Open Source community centers around these 3 technologies, I should get used to using them every day...

Network Flavors in OpenDaylight

Tue, 04 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

OpenStack uses the concept of flavors to define compute/storage configurations that vary in terms of resource consumption. When we start to consume the network as a resource pool, we need a similar concept. This post explains how this is achieved in the context of the Flavors application in the OpenDaylight project

A NetOps to DevOps Training Plan

Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In one of my rants, I asked people to kindly stop with the "All Network Guys will Need to be Programmers" FUD. My recommendation was basically for Networkers to be open to change, and to start broadening their horizons. DevOps is coming to networking and that is a FACT. You might be wondering what skills a Network DevOps Engineer needs and here I attempt to answer that.

My Dotfiles. Now on Github

Wed, 26 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Dotfiles are all those . files that sit in your ~ and customize your system. Here are mine.

Python bindings for the HP VAN SDN Controller

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

For the last 9 months, I've been silently working on a little pet project. It's finally ready to be released in to the wild and to be used by one and all for creating Python-based SDN Applications for the HP VAN SDN Controller.

Migrating from Wordpress to Pelican on PaaS - Part 1

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I've been blogging with Wordpress for the last 5 years on and off. It has some great features and is very easy to use, but it's not for me. This series of posts documents my transition from Wordpress to Pelican.

Migrating from Wordpress to Pelican on PaaS - Part 2

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Part 2 of a this 3 part series examines how I created my Pelican blog and migrated my Wordpress content with me.

Migrating from Wordpress to Pelican on PaaS - Part 3

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The final installment in this three part series. This covers installing Dokku and publishing your pelican blog to you new Docker-powere mini-Heroku.

Using Python for HP SDN

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A list of links for getting started to use Python to develop application with the HP VAN SDN Controller.

Remote Debugging OpenDaylight with IntelliJ

Wed, 29 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Remote Debugging OpenDaylight with IntelliJ is as easy as 1, 2, 3

Using the latest Open vSwitch with Devstack and OpenDaylight

Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

While setting up my OpenDaylight OVSDB and Devstack following the awesome instructions from Kyle Mestery, I thought it would be fun to run the latest OVS from source on my compute nodes...

Bypassing the memory check on a VMware ESXi 5

Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When my new HP ML10 arrived I was ready to install ESXi… until I realised that my 32GB of RAM wouldn’t be on its way for a week! To get around the memory check in ESXi 5.5, I found the awesome instructions here and with a few tweaks was able to get this working. Here are the 20 steps that I followed…

Installing Pyenv on Mac OSX

Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When I’m writing code, I’m usually in OSX. When I want to try things out, or check for compatibility between certain versions of Python, it’s handy to have them all accessible… enter Pyenv. Pyenv is based on Rbenv, which for you non-Rubyists is a tools that allows you to set up Ruby environments that are scoped either globally, per-shell or per-folder!

The definitve guide to setting up a USB Serial adapter and iTerm2 on OSX

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Using a few guides on the web and a little bit of ingenuity I was able to get my FTDI-based, USB to 2x Serial adapter working in Mac OSX 10.9 Mavericks with iTerm 2. This post documents the process and resources used in the hope of becoming the definitive guide to setting up a USB serial adapter in OSX and using iTerm2 as the terminal emulator. Even if it isn’t quite definitive, it should at least be useful to others - I hope!

HP VAN SDN Controller - Download, Manuals and Forum Links

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

As things are sometime hard to find on HP.com, I thought I’d consolidate them here.

Stahp it with the Network programmer FUD already

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Every week I see somebody ask “will all Network Engineers be programmers” on Twitter, LinkedIn, at a trade show or just to be antagonistic and for no other reason than to start an argument.

The anger inside has been brewing for over 12 months until the pressure valve finally released in the form of this blog post. Expect snark.

Configuring the HP MSR930 for BT Infinity

Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

After trying in vain to make my BT Home Hub 3 work as a Proper Router™ for my home lab I decided to take the plunge and get something better. Seeing as I work at HP, I thought I’d try the HP MSR 930

Learning though experimentation and breaking things

Tue, 12 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Lifehacker suggested“Learning to Code by Breaking Someone Else’s Code” and I wanted to share my personal experiences with this method….

Making JSON more Readable with Sublime Text

Mon, 11 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I saw Scott Lowe’s post on how he is making JSON more readable in BBEdit and I thought I’d share how I’m doing this in Sublime Text.

Adding Markdown support to your Wordpress Blog

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing on this week's theme of Markdown, I'll be explaining how to add Markdown to your blog in 3 easy steps.

Agile Writing - Week 1 - Getting Started with JIRA, GreenHopper and Markdown

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I finished reading The Phoenix Project at the beginning of May and it has had a profound affect on my outlook towards work. Not only was this a great read, but while I was reading I kept getting ideas on how I could implement the three ways at work. This diary documents the transition to an Agile Writing workflow.

Using Pandoc with Marked app

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I recently changed from MultiMarkdown to Pandoc. But I still wanted to use Marked app to preview my work…

Why I switched from MultiMarkdown to Pandoc

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

For the last 6 months I've been using Markdown where I can. Since embarking on the path towards a more Agile approach to writing, it has been necessary to use Markdown more and more. This has led me towards using Pandoc Markdown rather than MultMarkdown as my dialect of choice and I hope to explain why.

Arduino: Using my MelodyUtils library for R2-D2 style chirps

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

As part of a small robotics project I've been working on this weekend (affectionately called CoBe1, there will be a follow up blog on that soon) I decided to give by robot some personality in the form a a voice, and uploaded some of my code to GitHub.

Downgrading from iTunes 11 to 10.7 on OSX

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I decided to downgrade my iTunes from 11 to 10.7 for a number of reasons, top most was the fact the the new UI drives me barmy!

Install Raspbmc without a Keyboard or Mouse

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Once I had got my iTunes library downgraded to 10.7 and liberated some of my DRM'd media I thought it would be awesome to use my Raspberry Pi as an Airplay Receiver...

Save multiple Artboards as indiviudal EMF or WMF files in Adobe Illustrator CS6

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I've been creating a set of networking icons in Adobe Illustrator. To get these in a usable vector format for Visio and OmniGraffle stencils I need them in EMF or WMF format. Unfortunately the built-in Export function in Illustrator doesn't support Artboards for EMF/WMF but instead outputs one single file, so I needed to find a different solution...

Blast from the past: 10 reasons why JUNOS is better than IOS

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Preface

Back in late 2009 I wrote my first ever blog post. It must have been ok because I got some comments, a few RT's on twitter and it made @Etherealminds Internets of Interest. Since technicast.net is no longer I thought I would post this here for future reference.

About Me

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I'm Dave Tucker. I've worn many hats in the past (including a Red Fedora). From Consultant to Engineer, from Technical Marketing to Product Management but there is always one thing that remains constant. My love of making things that delight people.

I've helped to build a number of successful open source software products (for details see my Github profile). I co-founded and built SocketPlane which was acquired by Docker in March 2015. I'm currently helping to build Docker for Desktop (macOS and Windows).

My passion continues outside of work where I enjoy experimenting with single-board computers (Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone, Cubieboard et. al) and 3D Printing. When I'm not tinkering, I can be found spending time with my family, cooking or practicing Tai Chi.

If I'm not making, I like to be talking about making. To that end, I've spoken at conferences and events across the world about technical topics like Networking and Docker containers. I'm a big fan of mentoring others and I enjoy volunteering at my local library.

I've recently taken the plunge and entered back in to education to pursue a degree in Astronomy and Planetary Science and one day I would love for something that I make to end up in space.

My current professional interests are:

IoT and embedded development
Computer Graphics and Simulation including VR and AR
Video game development in Unity or Unreal Engine 4
Machine Learning and AI
Data Science

My current academic and research interests are:

Exoplanetary Science
Application of my coding skills for the betterment of Astronomy

*** DISCLAIMER ***

ALL WORDS HERE ARE MY OWN AND DO NOT REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF MY EMPLOYERS

Adding an image to DevStack

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I had some time to play with OpenStack this week so I rolled a DevStack install on an Ubuntu VM running in Parallels on my MacBook Air following the instructions here. Once OpenStack was up and running I was able to log in to Horizon at http://localhost/ and started to poke about. I decided I wanted to try and create a compute instance just to see what all the fuss was about … as it turns out, you need to have an image to base this instance on.

Applescript - Rename PDF to Title from Metadata

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Today I downloaded a the full set of Configuration and Command references for the HP 12500 Series Switch from HP.com. When I looked in my download finder they were all helpfully named "cXXXXXX.pdf". Interestingly enough the title in the metadata seemed to be correct, so I wrote an AppleScript to batch rename them.

Grabbing IETF RFCs and I-Ds in ebook format using rsync

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

IETF drafts get no love from my Tablet. I 've tried sending drafts to Instapaper for offline reading, I've tried using Readability but all of these fail to render correctly. Is it too much to ask to be able to read RFC's on the go?

My MacBook Air Docking Solution

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I decomissioned my CustoMac to return it to its origins as a gaming rig. This was mainly due to the fact that trying to keep my MacBook and CustoMac in sync was turing out to be very labour intensive... This means I am using my Macbook Air as my main office PC but its limited I/O was proving to be a little bit of a problem!