If OpenStack is already complex enough, troubleshooting OpenStack issues can be a nightmare! If you agree, you might be interested on the ini_comparer script.

The source of most of the issues with OpenStack is usually on the configuration files, which have the “ini” format. This format is not particularly easy to handle by old school “sed” people like me and in addition, the standard configuration files are meant to be self-documented, which means tons of lines of comments and commented options.

Putting this together, we get huge configuration files, with very similar lines and it is a pain in the lower back to check word by word, character by character every single keyword in the file.

So, provided that we have another configuration file that works fine, we can use the ini_comparer python script to do that for us. It can work with a combination of local or remote files. For example, a file on the local machine and another one in a remote one, both files are in the local machine, or both are in remote machines. Continue reading →