New updates have been released for the Ubuntu and Debian AMIs (EC2 images) published on:
The following notes apply to this release:
The images have been upgraded to use the newest 2.6.21 kernel, ramdisk, and kernel modules from Amazon. This fixes a serious security hole in the previous 2.6.21 kernel.
The Alestic PPA (personal package archive) has been added to the Ubuntu AMIs. This makes it easy to install software packages listed in this PPA, including ec2-consistent-snapshot.
The
runurlpackage from the Alestic PPA has been pre-installed on the Ubuntu AMIs. This can be a handy tool for setting up new instances with user-data scripts.The EC2 AMI tools have been upgraded to version 1.3-34544.
The ec2-ami-tools package version has been pinned so it does not get downgraded if the official Ubuntu archives still have older versions.
All packages have been upgraded to their respective latest versions.
The Ubuntu Karmic images were not updated and have been removed from the listings at the top of http://alestic.com. If you would like to use Ubuntu Karmic Beta, please test with the AMIs published by Canonical listed a bit lower down on the page.
Please give these new images a spin and let us know if you run into any problems.
Enjoy
Again thanks Eric for your efforts to bring high-quality Ubuntu releases to the EC2 community.
[You probably mean to replace the [user data scripts] in the 3rd bullet point with the link to http://alestic.com/2009/06/ec2-user-data-scripts ]
Shlomo: Thanks, fixed.
Just tried out the 32bit server image and noticed it doesn't seem have the fuse module anymore. With the previous AMI I didn't have any issues with fuse. It would be nice if this could be included again in the future. Otherwise so far so good!
llinder: Good catch and thanks for reporting this. It looks like Amazon's kernel modules do not include fuse, so I will be compiling it from scratch and building new AMIs which include it.
Eric,
Thanks for the updates, especially for upgrading to the patched kernel.
It looks like in these AMIs, /etc/init.d/ec2-run-user-data unconditionally sets $been_run_file after running the user-data script, whereas in previous images this happened prior to running the user-data script. This new approach does not allow user-data scripts to delete /var/ec2/*ec2-run-user-data.* in order to be re-run on the next boot. Was that an intentional change? I prefer the old way because I am using a model where I want to run the scripts every time I boot up.
Thanks
gabriel: It was not my intention to prevent what you would like to do. I'll take a look to see why it was changed and what would be involved in changing it back. You might also want to take a look at how the Canonical AMIs work as you'll eventually be migrating over to them.
One approach which would work on all releases would be to have the user-data run only on the first boot, but it installs normal init.d scripts to be run on every boot. Or, perhaps just adds itself to /etc/rc.local