Ubuntu released official images for Amazon EC2 for Intrepid (8.10) and Hardy (8.04) releases (not Jaunty image yet). These are server edition images. I’ve always used the great alestic ec2 images created by Eric Hammond for any Ubuntu or Debian release I needed in the past and was very happy with the quality of the images Eric maintained. This was also seen by the Ubuntu team and they worked with Eric to create their official images with the same quality and most of the features of what most people were used for Ubuntu images so far in EC2 world.

In my opinion here are the advantages of the newly released official Ubuntu images:

• officially support by Canonical (Eric has done a great job in patching and updating his images, but I am sure he has better things to do and let the Ubuntu team do this).
• custom kernels: for Intrepid 2.6.27 and Hardy 2.6.24 by having Amazon support in doing this (while alestic images were using the default Amazon Fedora kernel 2.6.21 image).
• apt mirrors in the ec2 cloud provided by Ubuntu: us.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com and eu.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com
• RightScale support for advanced integration with the RightScale platform for RightScale users.

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Just a few days after the eighth update of etch (4.0r8), the Debian project announced the first update of lenny. Opposed to the etch updates, this receives a minor numbering in the version 5.0.1 and also updates the /etc/debian_version file with this information; even if this is a simple change, I like it a lot as it will make it much easier to identify what update level a machine is running (just like redhat world had forever in /etc/redhat-release ). Besides this cosmetic change, most of the updates were already on security.debian.org; still there is a kernel update (minor version update of course) that fixes some openvz, nfs bugs (see debian kernel changelog for full details) and because of this also an updated debian-installer.

“The Debian project is pleased to announce the first update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename lenny). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 5.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.”

Release Announcement: http://debian.org/News/2009/20090411

Recently I started using twitter more and more. It took me a while to understand its usage, but today I think of twitter as a very useful tool to quickly communicate and receive news. Instead of blogging about some news I find it much easier (and faster) to tweet them. For example:

• Debian GNU/Linux 4.0r8 eighth update: http://debian.org/News/2009/20090408 #debian #etch #
• Results for #Debian Project Leader 2009 Election: Steve McIntyre was reelected for another year! http://is.gd/s2xV #

could have been the subjects of a new blog post, but now twitter feels much more natural to share such news, that don’t really need a blog post.

Moving forward, I thought that bringing this information from twitter to my blog in a weekly digest blog post would be something cool, and users of my blog not using twitter could find interesting. I setup the wordpress plugin called “Twitter Tools” to do just that. Yesterday the twitter digest post was published and I was looking at it and it was not looking so good; it was just a list of thoughts that were not related, and were either outdated or taken out of some discussion had in real-time on twitter; it was useless…

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When I started working as a sysadmin (about 10 years ago) there was this obsession about uptime. Everyone considered this the greatest sign that you are doing a good job as a sysadmin if you were able ‘to keep the machine running’ for a long time. Looking back, I believe this was mainly because there were not so many systems in place at that time, and everything was in the early days: we were running linux kernel 2.x, we had some ‘fancy’ pentiums as super servers, and were doing fancy bgp exchanges with cisco 3600 routers, and most of our clients were using dial-up lines to connect. Uff… those were fun times Anyway, we didn’t had failover systems implemented, nor did we had fancy monitoring and reporting on all possible things, like we started to implement as business was starting to depend on those systems more and more. During that time, any sysadmin I knew would show how good he was based on the uptime he was able to run one of his ‘core’ servers. When we had to reboot for something (hardware upgrade, or failure, etc.) this was a tragedy as we were losing ‘the uptime’.

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