Skip to main content

Your submission was sent successfully! Close

Thank you for signing up for our newsletter!
In these regular emails you will find the latest updates from Canonical and upcoming events where you can meet our team.Close

Thank you for contacting us. A member of our team will be in touch shortly. Close

  1. Blog
  2. Article

Canonical
on 17 June 2014

OpenStack One-Liners


One-line bash commands for managing, deploying and testing OpenStack and related components, hypervisors and containers.  Some simple and obvious, some cool and questionable, hopefully all useful.  Check back on this post, I’ll likely add more. #1 – Watch Nova Compute for Non-Active Instances on Openstack Outputs total instance count and non-active instances. Useful for keeping an eye on potential problem VMs in a PAUSED, ERROR, SHUTOFF or other non-active state. Command: watch --interval=1 'nova list --all-tenants | wc -l && nova list --all-tenants | grep -v "ACTIVE"' #2 – Ping a List of Hosts Forever:  1-Line Loop A simple one-line while loop containing a for loop to ping a list of hosts each with one packet, followed by a 1/4 second iteration delay and an output text filter. Command: while true; do for h in bcu vxu rbu; do ping ${h} -c 1 | grep ttl; sleep 0.25; done; done;   #3 – Watch Cinder Volumes and Snapshots and Glance Images in Openstack Useful for working with volumes, snapshots and images in small Openstack deployments. watch --interval=1 "cinder list && cinder snapshot-list && glance image-list"   #4 – Watch Linux Containers and Directory-Backed Storage I find this one handy when I need to monitor LXC containers on Ubuntu Server – Precise Pangolin, Trusty Tahr, Utopic Unicorn and later.  The Ubuntu Server Guide has a detailed section on LXC usage. watch "sudo lxc-ls --fancy --nesting && sudo ls -Ralh /var/lib/lxc/"   #5 – Watch Your Disk Space Disappear This is a tail-style output of the free space on /. while true; do df -h / | grep '/' | awk '{ print $4 }'; sleep 1; done 6.1G 6.1G 6.0G 6.0G 5.9G 5.8G 5.7G 5.7G  

Related posts


Rawand Benour
5 June 2025

What if your container images were security-maintained at the source?

Ubuntu Article

Software supply chain security has become a top concern for developers, DevOps engineers, and IT leaders. High-profile breaches and dependency compromises have shown that open source components can introduce risk if not properly vetted and maintained. Although containerization has become commonplace in contemporary development and deploym ...


Octavio Galland
30 May 2025

Apport local information disclosure vulnerability fixes available

Ubuntu Article

Qualys discovered two vulnerabilities in various Linux distributions which allow a local attacker with permission to create user namespaces to leak core dumps for processes of suid executables. These affect both apport, the Ubuntu default core dump handler (CVE-2025-5054), and systemd-coredump, the default core dump handler in Red Hat Ent ...


Nkeiruka Whenu
28 May 2025

The 2025 Frankfurt Engineering Sprint: What did you miss?

Community Article

If you have ever wondered what goes on when your friends say that they’re going on a “Business trip” abroad, then allow me to spill the beans 🫘. Let’s recap what you may have missed from Canonical’s Frankfurt Engineering Sprint this May, shall we? My name is Nkeiruka, and I work as a Software Engineer ...