Skip to main content
  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


estelacarmona
11 June 2026

The next era of telco clouds: get open infrastructure choice with Sylva and Canonical Kubernetes

5G Article

Achieving vendor neutrality in telco clouds requires an infrastructure layer that respects open standards, without wrapping them in rigid platform layers. By combining upstream alignment with up to 15 years of support longevity, Canonical’s approach to Sylva is built around a requirement that matters deeply to telcos: follow upstream clou ...


Benjamin Ryzman
9 June 2026

What is RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)?

AI Networking

Previous articles walked through RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) as a programming model and InfiniBand as the fabric that was built around it. Both led to the same conclusion, even if it was never stated outright: moving data, not compute, becomes the bottleneck once systems scale. So what happens when you want RDMA, but you’re ...


Freyja Cooper
5 June 2026

Beyond tokens per watt – using Ubuntu 26.04 LTS for AI

AI Article

Tokens per watt (TpW) – the measure of useful AI work produced per watt of energy consumed – is the metric at top of mind for CEOs, heads of AI, and infrastructure teams alike. With the tremendous cost of GPU clusters, extracting as much value as possible from the expense is critical. But in the ...