I’m polishing up an article about how to build images from scratch with Ubuntu vmbuilder, both for S3 based AMIs and for EBS boot AMIs. Since nobody is paying any attention this new year’s weekend (except for you seven and you know who you are) I figured I’d wait until Monday or so to publish the article.
However, if you have nothing better to do this long weekend and you’d like a preview copy of the article, drop me a note with your email address. All I ask for in return is that you review (and perhaps even test) the instructions and send me feedback where things aren’t clear or don’t work.
That sounds really great! I'm hoping that this means we'll see EBS versions of the Alestic Ubuntu images appearing at some point. I tried converting my running instance to an EBS boot version and couldn't make it work (looks like the root changed too much while I was copying it with dd, rendering the resulting image unbootable.) A nice clean image would be just the ticket :).
n.sherlock: I have no plans at this point to create EBS boot AMIs with the old Amazon kernels. All my recommendations are for folks to move to the Ubuntu AMIs published with the latest Ubuntu kernels. The upcoming article describes how to use the Ubuntu vmbuilder tool to build your own EBS boot AMI with the new kernels. You can also subscribe to the following bug on Launchpad if you are interested in having Canonical publish EBS boot AMIs for you to use:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-on-ec2/+bug/492048
Thanks for that info :). I think I'll wait for that article to be released, as I'm still dithering over whether or not to attempt another image of our current server.
Eric,
I would like to test your article.
Erika
Erika: Thanks! The published article is now available:
http://alestic.com/2010/01/vmbuilder-ebs-boot-ami