Alestic.com - A Personal AWS Blog by Eric Hammond

Canonical has released official Ubuntu images for EC2 for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic.

The primary technical benefit brought by Canonical's involvement in building official Ubuntu images is that custom kernels can be built for EC2 through a relationship with Amazon. This means that the Ubuntu images can now run on more modern Ubuntu kernels instead of on Amazon's older, Fedora kernels.

Other differences are listed below:

Items listed are likely to change as images are enhanced. This table may or may not be updated to match. Please leave comments if you notice or question other differences.

Note: There are some older (2009-04) Canonical AMIs floating around for Hardy and Intrepid. These have not been maintained and are not recommended at this point.

Updated 2009-06-15: Alestic.com Jaunty is using an Ubuntu mirror inside EC2. Alestic.com images using load balanced mirror with failover between EC2 availability zones.

Updated 2009-06-25: Alestic.com published Karmic (Alpha) but later withdrew.

Updated 2009-10-29: Canonical released Karmic. None of the image currently have RightScale support built in, but RightScale has their own Ubuntu AMIs.

New updates have been released for all of the Ubuntu and Debian AMIs listed on:

https://alestic.com

The primary enhancements in this release are:

• Build using latest debootstrap v1.0.10

• Output new ssh host key fingerprints to console log for security.

• Use newly built kernel modules where fuse supports NFS export.

• All Ubuntu packages upgraded to latest versions

How to get the ssh host key fingerprint from the console output and compare it when using ssh to connect to the instance is described in the “Connecting to your instance” section of the EC2 Getting Started Guide:

http://ec2gsg-running.notlong.com

This is not necessary, but does add a bit of extra security if you are worried about folks intercepting and modifying your ssh connections to EC2 instances.

The NFS support in fuse should let you share an S3-based fuse file system (like PersistentFS) with other hosts over NFS.

Enjoy

Though it is not possible to compile and run your own kernels on Amazon EC2, it is possible to compile and run your own kernel modules and bundle them with your EC2 images. The trick is that the kernel modules need to be compiled with exactly the same kernel source and compiler versions as were used to build the original kernel.

The steps below were used to build the updated 2.6.21 kernel modules for the Ubuntu and Debian AMIs listed at https://alestic.com