I’ve recently been doing some work with SwiftStack, and thought it might be handy to put together a how-to document for getting started with SwiftStack’s test drive functionality. There’s a bunch of reasonably simple steps, with pictures, so I’ve put them in a document that you can grab from here. But first, a few links that will come in handy:

• Sign up for the SwiftStack trial here;
• The SwiftStack Quick Start guide can be found here;
• I left the Swift User creation process out of my document – but you can read about that here; and
• An interesting guide to SwiftStack hardware considerations can be found here.

To do this trial I used my Ravello Systems provided vExpert account to provide compute and disk resources temporarily via Google’s cloud. Incidentally, if you need to use a private key with ssh on your Mac you need to be mindful of the permissions on your key file (this is no doubt old news for many of you).

Last login: Mon Jul 11 05:06:05 on ttys000
imac27:~ dan$ ssh -i /Users/dan/Downloads/Test1.pem ravello@centos63vanilla.ravcloud.com
The authenticity of host 'centos63vanilla.ravcloud.com (104.144.155.170)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is SHA256:fAQIdjsC5X5d0c+J+Nj7dF9L3qqyzFYmPYkagKLWCCg.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'centos63vanilla.ravcloud.com,104.144.155.170' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@         WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!          @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Permissions 0644 for '/Users/dan/Downloads/Test1.pem' are too open.
It is required that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.
Load key "/Users/dan/Downloads/Test1.pem": bad permissions
Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic).

Note that you’ll need to modify the permissions on your key file to 600 to ensure that it is accepted.

imac27:~ dan$ chmod 600 /Users/dan/Downloads/Test1.pem
imac27:~ dan$ ssh -i /Users/dan/Downloads/Test1.pem ravello@centos63vanilla.ravcloud.com
[ravello@test1 ~]$ top

And you’re good to go.

I’ve written about SwiftStack before and was intrigued by the relative ease with which you could deploy Swift capability inside your DC. If you’re looking to deliver this kind of capability internally, I recommend looking into SwiftStack. The test drive is a snap to sign up for you, and if you follow the bouncing ball you’ll be up and running in no time.