Alestic.com - A Personal AWS Blog by Eric Hammond

New updates have been released for the Ubuntu and Debian AMIs (EC2 images) published on:

https://alestic.com

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 runurl package 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 https://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

New updates have been released for the Ubuntu and Debian AMIs (EC2 images) published on:

https://alestic.com

The following notes apply to this release:

• The EC2 AMI tools have been upgraded to version 1.3-34544. Note that an “apt-get upgrade” will downgrade the EC2 AMI tools because the versions of the ec2-ami-tools package currently in the Ubuntu Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty archives are outdated. If you have an easy solution to this, please let us know.

• The ssh host key regeneration has been moved to run after the RNG is seeded. This improves security, especially for folks who are verifying the ssh host key on the first connect by comparing the fingerprint to the value in the instance console output. Thanks to Andrew Becherer for suggesting this improvement.

• The Ubuntu Karmic Alpha images were not updated. Due to a new kernel requirement, Karmic will no longer run on Amazon’s 2.6.21 kernel. Once Canonical releases an Ubuntu kernel with the appropriate features, the Karmic series may be resumed. Running “apt-get upgrade” on an existing Karmic AMI will cause it to be inaccessible after rebooting.

• The Debian Etch desktop images were not updated because apparently LaTeX refuses to build a format from a source file which is more than five years old. If there is anybody who wants Etch desktops and is willing to investigate, please contact me, otherwise I plan to discontinue support for this series. If you’re using Debian, I’d encourage you to upgrade to Lenny “stable” anyway.

Please give these new images a spin and let us know if you run into any problems.

Enjoy

Update: The process described here is deprecated for building Ubuntu AMIs. The Ubuntu vmbuilder software has replaced ec2ubuntu-build-ami. In addition I recommend starting with the Ubuntu images published by Canonical as described in this article:

Building EBS Boot AMIs Using Canonical’s Downloadable EC2 Images

The below information may be useful for building Debian AMIs, but EC2 kernels are slowly getting out of date for running modern Debian releases.

The Ubuntu and Debian images for EC2 which are published on https://alestic.com were built with the ec2ubuntu-build-ami software. This program can also be used by advanced users who wish to build from scratch their own Ubuntu or Debian images for EC2.

http://ec2ubuntu-build-ami.notlong.com

The basic instructions for using this script are as follows: