alonswartz

Route53 is an excellent service, and the latest price reduction makes it even more attractive - but using the API directly as an end user is a little cumbersome, especially for cloud servers.

A while ago I thought "wouldn't it be great if when launching a cloud server some magic would happen and the server would get assigned a human/friendly name of my choice? I'm tired of remembering IP addresses, and logging into my DNS management console to setup records."

Following that thought we added Domain management and a free dynamic DNS service to the TurnKey Linux Hub.

If anyone is interested:

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/hub-domains (announcement)

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/hubdns (documentation)

https://github.com/turnkeylinux/hubdns (source code)

A little late to the conversation, but none the less...

You could use the TurnKey Hub for easy deployment of a pre-configured Django appliance to Amazon EC2. If you prefer the command line you can use the Hub's API or CLI, for example:

$ hub-launch django [-options]

If you've enabled TKLBAM (encrypted backups of changes to files, databases, package management state, even users and groups), you can launch a new cloud server which will be automatically restored upon boot:

$ hub-launch $BACKUP_ID

Take that a step further and say you're developing your Django app in a local VM. When you're ready to deploy to the cloud you just trigger a backup, then launch it in the cloud.

I keep a list of books I've read and highly recommend here [1]. Almost all of them include the first chapter free (via kindle for web).

[1] http://www.alonswartz.org/books/

Article on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_refund

Been using them for years on Linux, can't live without them. I use three 1) email + timelog 2) journal + coding 3) reference + browser. With the help of the virtual desktops and keybindings, any app or desktop I need access to is a key combo away.

Interesting sort-of-related article: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/08/the-large-display-p...

You're right. The Studio 16 XPS comes with a backlit keyboard (optional).

Good point on the battery life. Reports running Linux I've seen are 2.5 hours (which is really poor), as well as 6-7 hours (possibly due to power consumption tweaks). The aesthetics are nice to have, not the deciding factor.

I totally agree that basing solely off geographic location is not adequate, so let me clarify the implementation details.

In production, we use GeoIP to determine the country/state of the server in question, and then perform a lookup in the generated indexes to determine the preferred region. I say preferred (and not closest) because the indexes are static, and are not calculated on the fly. This was a design decision to allow us to tweak the indexes with the help of community feedback.

The location based calculation described was used to generate the baseline indexes to provide a relatively good starting point. One of the reasons for writing this blog post and publishing the indexes, was to take us to the next phase of tweaking the indexes, hence the closing paragraph:

"we need your help to tweak the indexes - as you have better knowledge and experience on your connection latency and speed. Please let us know if you think we should associate your country/state to a different Amazon region."

The countries and US indexes consist of 249 and 62 entries, respectively. We don't have the resources to perform latency testing in each and every location, for that we need the communities help.

List of titles and authors: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/8641676/100-Must-Read-Books-The-...

Not very surprising, but there is a perfect correlation between the major "junctions" and Amazon's 4 data centers spanning the world, situated in North California (us-west-1), North Virginia (us-east-1), Ireland (eu-west-1) and Singapore (ap-southeast-1).

Recently I published an article describing how we find the closest data center using GeoIP and indexing, might be of interest. http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/geoip-amazon-regions

More in-depth information is available at: http://docs.python.org/library/logging.html

Just to be clear, TurnKey Linux _is_ an open source project. All custom packages are open source, and all changes made to other packages are published as well, according to the GPL. The ISO and VM builds are free to download and use, no strings attached what so ever.

The subscription you are referring to is currently free. 6 months ago we began soliciting feedback from the community regarding pricing [1]. You might want to take a look at the feedback we have received and the motivation behind adding a premium to the AMI images. We have yet to come to a decision though, so feedback is most definitely welcome.

In a nutshell, the idea is to fund development. When you use Amazon EC2, you are already charged on usage, so the idea is to add a reasonable mark-up on those fees so people who are using TurnKey give back a little bit into a pool which helps support the project and fund future development.

We believe this is a win-win for the community, because a premium would fund development of open source appliances rather than expensive and closed proprietary alternatives. To the casual user a few bucks here and there would hardly be noticed on their bill but multiply this thousands of times over and suddenly we have the resources to do much more for the project's users.

[1] http://www.turnkeylinux.org/polls/amazon-ec2-fees

The TurnKey Amazon EC2 documentation is available here [1], and the full listing of the AMI's is here [2].

Out of curiosity, why don't you want to use the TurnKey Hub (I.e., beta cloud offering)?

[1] http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/ec2

[2] http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/ec2/ami

Thanks for the feedback. We will be implementing server "tagging" soon, which will allow you to sort/filter the servers.

Take a look at TurnKey Linux. We just announced free access to all AMI's (40), including Rails, Django, Symfony, LAMP stack, Drupal6, Joomla, Wordpress, File Server, Domain Controller, Torrent Server, Redmine, MediaWiki, Zimbra and many others.

Optimizations for EC2 include a custom developed mechanism (EBSmount) that auto-mounts EBS devices when attached, support for automating EC2 instance setup via user-data scripts, security updates installed on boot (prevents window of vulnerability) and an AJAX web shell and a rich web administration interface (over SSL).

Announcement: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/maintenance-release

EC2 Details: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/ec2

The new release 2009.10-2 [1] is pre-installed with all security updates that have come out since the last release batch. Security updates will also be installed on first boot to prevent a window of vulnerability from opening between the time a fresh appliance is deployed and until the (daily) cron job that installs the security updates runs.

Note that Ubuntu 8.04 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release which will continue to be supported by Canonical with security updates for another 3 years (until April 2013).

All appliances will be rebuilt on top of Lucid (the new LTS) when it is released at the end of the month.

[1] http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/maintenance-release

Thanks Thomas, I updated the post.