The latest version of RDO OpenStack is a pain

This is for the caracal release on Centos9 Stream as documened at https://www.rdoproject.org/deploy/packstack/ for the packstack install.

First off, I have not been able to get this working yet. So this post is just covering the first problem you are going to hit.

network service not found

For those that may have more patience than me there is an important step missing in the install instructions, which are for CentOS Stream 9, which does not support the old network scripts.
Where it says

sudo systemctl disable firewalld;
sudo systemctl stop firewalld;
sudo systemctl disable NetworkManager;
sudo systemctl stop NetworkManager;
sudo systemctl enable network;
sudo systemctl start network

It is important to note that will not work; CentOS 9 does not support legacy networking.
In later steps it adds a repository, too late, you need to do that first. What it needs to say is

sudo dnf config-manager --enable crb
sudo dnf install -y centos-release-openstack-caracal
sudo dnf update -y
sudo dnf -y install openstack-network-scripts  # the legacy network scripts
sudo systemctl disable firewalld;
sudo systemctl stop firewalld;
sudo systemctl disable NetworkManager;
sudo systemctl stop NetworkManager;
sudo systemctl enable network;
sudo systemctl start network

However be aware that will not magically create the ifcfg-interface files you need (NetworkManager no longer used those legacy file locations, and has even changed file syntax from the old legacy format in the files it does create so you cannot jusy copy them). So if you do not create them yourself you will have no network configured after a reboot.

It is actually trivial to create them.
Do a “ip a” to get the interface name and MAC address, as mentioned in the doc you do need a static ip-address so this example is for a static ip-address. This example, edited for your interface/MAC/ipaddr of course, must be in a file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-interface where interface is the name of your interface (enps01/eth1 etc not the MAC).

TYPE=Ethernet
PROXY_METHOD=none
BROWSER_ONLY=no
BOOTPROTO=none
DEFROUTE=yes
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6INIT=no
NAME=enp1s0
UUID=if-you-know-uuid-insert-it-else-trust-name+device
DEVICE=enp1s0
ONBOOT=yes
IPADDR=static-ipaddr-to-use
PREFIX=24
GATEWAY=ipaddr-of-your-gateway-router
DNS1=your-internal-dns-ipaddrs
DNS2=182.168.1.nnn 
DOMAIN="your.internal.domain"
IPV6_DISABLED=yes

I would also suggest before running packstack may need to “chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.local” as during my packstack run lots of “is not marked executable, skipping” messages were logged for that file.

Then reboot, make sure networking is a you want, and carry on to run packstack.

Why this post stops at that issue

I do not believe it is possible to get this working easily as for starters the Horizon dashboard install is missing dependencies that prevent it being used at all; and I do not intend to debug missing django.core dependencies.

The nova network component is also in a loop logging warning messages, that I could probably resolve but as there is no dashboard why bother; one issue at a time.

Horizon logs show only the below which is why trying to logon to the dashboard fails; I can only assume this is a packaging error that will be fixed at some point.

   AttributeError: module 'django.core.cache.backends.memcached' has no attribute 'MemcachedCache'

Nova logs are full of, and wil eventually fill the filesystem with the messages below. Warning and not errors, but I would prefer my disk space to be used for image and instance volumes not warning messages. There is probably a config file setting that will fix it.

   025-05-12 14:49:18.146 2057 WARNING nova.virt.libvirt.driver [None req-5be22791-044d-4bda-af49-b0192f9f0adf - - - - - -] This host appears to have multiple sockets per NUMA node. The `socket` PCI NUMA affinity will not be supported.

I simply do not have time to look into sorting these out at the moment.
But the “network” service not being available is the first issue anyone will hit on this newish caracal release by RDO so I hope it helps some of you move on.