Brian Parsons

Arch Linux EC2 AMIs have been updated. This release includes a fix for heartbleed (CVE-2014-0160).

Arch Linux EC2 AMIs have been updated. This release includes a patch for CVE-2014-0038. If you are using these images you should upgrade to the latest kernel (LTS or mainstream).

Arch Linux EC2 AMIs have been updated.

Update August 21, 2016

I am no longer maintaining Arch Linux images for Amazon EC2, and I no longer recommend using Arch Linux on servers. The attitude in some of the core pieces of the system has become far less disciplined and… what I will in a politically correct way say is more centered around agenda than users or system use.

Specifically the issue that broke this for me is the way versions of pacman since the file reorganization effort remove symlinks in the root path install path of a package. This bug has been brought up several times in pacman’s history. The author and current Arch czar has stated that symlinks are improper and should be replaced with bind mounts. This approach breaks the best practice of being able to separate the OS from the data, and using bind mounts causes disk metrics, analysis and monitoring to misreport. In previous instances, this bug was fixed, however so far this time it is not being addressed.

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I have an updated Arch Linux image for Amazon EC2 that is systemd. I created a boot script that sets the hostname and root keys. It will even update DNS in Route53 and send you an email letting you know the instance IP.

Released under the MIT license on github.

I am working on cleaning up the base image that I use on Amazon EC2 and publishing the AMI as well.

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Rackspace has put out a nice infographic highlighting what IT decision makers are looking for as well as what they are concerned about when it comes to cloud.

Rackspace® — Rogue IT, Cloud Lock-In Dominate Cloud Concerns [INFOGRAPHIC]

While I haven’t *knock on wood* had any EBS failures in Amazon’s cloud myself, I have heard the horror stories and that makes me uneasy. Another issue with disks in cloud that I do run into a lot is latency. The disk io in many cases is slower to begin with, and random bouts of latency tend to crop up.

I have addressed both of these problems by deploying RAID 10 on my Amazon EC2 instances. It sounds techie but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do this. If you are managing an EC2 instance you can do it and I have published a script that will get you there in a few steps.

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I wrote a python script to update DNS on Amazon Route53. You can use it on dynamic hosts by putting it into cron, or on boot for cloud instances with inconsistent IP addresses.

It uses the boto Amazon Web Services python interface for the heavy lifting. You’ll need that installed. (Arch Linux has a python-boto package)

You need to edit the script to place your AWS credentials in the two variables near the top of the script (awskeyid, awskeysecret). Then it’s ready to go.

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