And then there were three...

Hi all! This is my virgin TurnKey blog post. Many of you on the forums would have come across me in your travels no doubt. I have been a volunteer serial poster on the forums now for many years. I have even had the privilege of having a blog post written about me by Liraz (one of the core TurnKey devs).

What's the best way to do free software bounties?

First, I'd like to thank Joey, Noah and Jeremy for providing much needed feedback on a related blog post. Thanks guys. It really got me thinking. What if instead of a contest we figured out how to do community funded bounties? Wouldn't an open, continual system of free software bounties be much a better idea than doing another contest?

TurnKey 13 critical security issue (Heartbleed / CVE-2014-0160)

Without action, your TurnKey 13 installations may remain vulnerable to the critical Heartbleed OpenSSL attack (DSA-2896-1 CVE-2014-0160). This is not a theoretical attack.

What if all Debian/Ubuntu based dists used TKLDev?

Imagine if every Debian distribution in the world in the world was using TurnKey's build chain and collaborating with us on its development instead of limping along with various inefficient ad-hoc tools?

TurnKey currently doesn't get as many contributions back from the free software community as we'd like (our fault). I think there are two main reasons for that:

The pros, cons and alternatives to financial rewards in an open source project

Here's another blog post that started life as a response to a private email Jeremy Davis (JedMeister on the forums) sent me regarding various things we could try to recruit more developers as TurnKey contributors:

Building a better, bigger TurnKey library

This blog post started out as a response to a private email discussion between me and contributing developer Eric (tssgery) whom recently developed TurnKey Observium, one of TurnKey's top ten downloads. Observium is very popular for a newly hatched appliance. It has the same number of downloads as Redmine, which we've supported for a few years now!

Eric wrote:

TKL has two big issues as I see it:

  1. Marketing. You're the best kept secret of the internet.
  2. Testing. Too many appliance/products to be supported.
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Creating a bootable USB drive from an ISO image

What's an ISO?

ISO, short for ISO9660 is the standard filesystem format for optical disc media. This is the default format created by the TurnKey GNU/Linux build system (AKA TKLDev)

Why would you want to write an ISO to a USB drive?

Typically one of two reasons:

Announcing TurnKey Docker optimized builds

Please note: This blog post is quite dated, for the latest updated info regarding usage of TurnKey Docker builds, please see the doc page.

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Announcing TurnKey LXC

In a nutshell, LXC (LinuX Containers) can be thought of as the middle ground between a chroot on steroids and a full fledged virtual machine, making it possible to run multiple isolated "containers" on a single host.

There has been quiet a lot of interest in supporting TurnKey on LXC, so I set out to see what it would take.

TurnKey 13 out, TKLBAM 1.4 now backup/restores any Linux system

This is really two separate announcements rolled into one:

  1. TurnKey 13 - codenamed "satisfaction guaranteed or your money back!"

    The new release celebrates 5 years since TurnKey's launch. It's based on the latest version of Debian (7.2) and includes 1400 ready-to-use images: 330GB worth of 100% open source, guru integrated, Linux system goodness in 7 build types that are optimized and pre-tested for nearly any deployment scenario: bare metal, virtual machines and hypervisors of all kinds, "headless" private and public cloud deployments, etc.

    New apps in this release include OpenVPN, Observium and Tendenci.

    We hope this new release reinforces the explosion in active 24x7 production deployments (37,521 servers worldwide) we've seen since the previous 12.1 release, which added 64-bit support and the ability to rebuild any system from scratch using TKLDev, our new self-contained build appliance (AKA "the mothership").

    To visualize active deployments world wide, I ran the archive.turnkeylinux.org access logs through GeoIPCity and overlaid the GPS coordinates on this Google map (view full screen):

     

  2. TKLBAM 1.4 - codenamed "give me liberty or give me death!"

    Frees TKLBAM from its shackles so it can now backup files, databases and package management state without requiring TurnKey Linux, a TurnKey Hub account or even a network connection. Having those will improve the usage experience, but the new release does its best with what you give it.

    I've created a convenience script to help you install it in a few seconds on any Debian or Ubuntu derived system:

    URL=https://raw.github.com/turnkeylinux/tklbam/master/contrib/ez-apt-install.sh
    wget -O - -q $URL | PACKAGE=tklbam /bin/bash
    

    There's nothing preventing TKLBAM from working on non Debian/Ubuntu Linux systems as well, you just need to to install from source and disable APT integration with the --skip-packages option.

    Other highlights: support for PostgreSQL, MySQL views & triggers, and a major usability rehaul designed to make it easier to understand and control how everything works. Magic can be scary in a backup tool.

    Here's a TurnKey Hub screenshot I took testing TKLBAM on various versions of Ubuntu:

    Screenshot of TurnKey Hub backups

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