TurnKey Core 13.0 RC (i386, amd64, wheezy)

Hi Tim, I have Alfresco here on bitnami but am interested in your efforts on TKLX. I would be grateful if you could keep us informed of your progress.

Alon,

Your timing could not have been better.

I just finished an Alfresco build on a non-TKLX 64-bit Debian Squeeze using DotDeb and select Wheezy packages (yes it seems to work fine if anyone was wondering) but I missed my TKLBAM and I hated having to make the decision to move to a two-platform model or to move away from TKLX.

Consider me a confirmed guinea pig.

I'll download TKLX13 Core next week and re-build my Alfresco. If you want a guinea pig for your build infrastructure I'll build the Alfresco using it. Perhaps Adrian Moya might be convinced to re-connect with his legacy Alfresco patch and we can help you with the TKLX13 Alfresco Appliance :-)

Thanks again to you and Liraz for your tireless efforts and excellent workmanship on this significant initiative.

Hi BenL,

Are you currently lifecycle managing one or more Alfresco installations or are you in the "been there, done that, no thanks" crowd?

I agree: Alfresco is just too expensive and too complicated.=20

In my (brief) Alfresco experience (installed and set up in my previous job) it was a resource hungry beast and as such my personal preference was to keep it in a separate VM. Although personally I generally prefer the redundancy of having each function within it's own VM (actually I use OVZ containers under Proxmox wherever possible). So as long as the host doesn't go down it is unlikely that you'll lose all your services at once... But that's just me...

Yes, Alfresco has dependencies on Tomcat (with many whistles and bells), LibreOffice, PostreSQL, GoogleDocs....  the list goes on and on...  So the SMB challenges are indeed daunting.  Of course, that's the reason for having an appliance, but what I sense is that at least some folks here see this as a fairly extensive undertaking (i.e., not something  you can easily do in your spare time).

In your case, Tim, I can see how Alfresco could end up consuming a sizable amount of time in an undertaking that is intended to be far more comprehensive in scope.  Reading what you are up to, it's interesting that I am having to combine a few TKL VMs to accomplish what your one-stop solution will do on its own.  I will be very much interested in checking out your VM when it's available.

Heavy-weight SMB issues asside, Alfresco is an accessible, intuitive, easy-to-use document repository for management and non-technical employees as well as customers and partner companies.  Once I install it and spend a little while with introducing the admin functions to a saavy user I can turn it over to them to manage user accounts and organize the repository so I can get to work developing the actual solutions we deliver.  So there is value, but the issues cannot be ignored, so it seems Alfresco will probably need to reside in a dedicated TKL VM.  That wouldn't be the end of the world.  So this will probably come to to being a question of having time to complete the effort....   That's why there's an Alfresco Cloud service, eh?

Hi Lawrence,

No additional progress on the Alfresco appliance. Sorry.

I'm still working through the appliance lifecyle management strategy for it.

I've been on a journey to build up a single unified SMB technical stack based entirely on open-source and cloud architecture that can be deployed under a managed service model at an SMB price point so I tend to look at lifecycle management first, maturity second and feature set third. Alfresco is excellent on items 2 & 3 but expensive for an SMB market for item1 (it has a hefty lifecycle management cost at the SMB level...lots of different moving parts under the bonnet...under the hood for any americans in the audience). Before I commit to including it in my stack I needed to ensure that it was not an overkill for an SMB client.

I have currently standardised on an integrated Customer Cloud based on:

- GitLab / GitHub (Build Centre)

- Wordpress + selective integrated Plugin Suite (Customer Cloud)

- OTRS & Zabbix & Pingdom (Support)

- Developer Tools & Test Cloud

So I am taking a pause to consolidate my lifecycle management structure before cotinuing the stack growth phase.

Alfresco wants to be the document management backbone of my stack but I expect it to double my lifecycle management costs and client support costs so I'm really just in a hold pattern until I sort out the logistics and commercials. I do have a client who this may be a perfect fit for so I will be revisiting this over the May / June timeframe.

Let's keep in touch.

I know this thread is old, but I am very interested in an Alfresco appliance.  I am starting a software group for a small company and have decided to standardize on TurnkeyLinux appliances for our development infrastructure except in cases where there is a compelling reason to do otherwise.  For an emerging team such as ours (just brought on my first new engineer) and no IT department we can avoid spending time on many things that TKL has built in, such as security updates and backups.

TKL rocks!  All except one VM we are using is TKL.  The hold-out is an Alfresco VM I created months ago that is CentOS 6.2-based.  If time allows I may try my hand at building a TKL appliance, but I am spread thin on time and don't want to duplicate effort - especially since I'd be cutting my teeth creating my first TKL appliance.

Thanks for your efforts!

No worries Jeremy. As long as you're patient. I have to multiplex with other things so it will take 3 or 4 weeks elapsed time.

I will also be scratching my head over the latest disclosures of Java weaknesses and deciding how we might best secure the appliance and it would be good to have someone to bounce options off of.

Nice work once again guys. I like your thinking! Some of the TKL dreams getting a bit closer to reality! I'll download it and take it for a spin sometime soon.

@Tim - I'd be very interested in trying out your Alfresco appliance when it gets to that stage! I had a go at setting it up on vanilla Squeeze a little while ago but it was a bit flakey (I don't think it really had enough RAM was the main issue, but I didn't have any more to spare at the time). And it'd be great if we could get Adrian reinvigorated here again too. That man is a bit of a powerhouse... 

Go Aussie :-)

13 looks like an awesome release too!

I am so hanging for sydney support...

Purely from a forum mod perspective it is definately been a good choice. I don't think there has been any OS level bugs reported since the switch (still a few bugs but related to  the softwar on top of the OS). Ubuntu is great but Debian is simply much more polished and tested/

Great news on the x64 front! And I am still VERY happy with the decision to move to Debian for stability for the very reasons Dylan stated. Hopefully installer from iso will recognize plugged in USB flash drives for feeding non-free debs (like Broadcom NIC firmware) during install (several of the v12 spins did not recognize the usb as a deb source on install).

But I have just updated and tidied the bug tracker (on LaunchPad) a bit so that is another (or additional) option... I'm not really sure on the dev's preference so I try to report bugs (that I experience and other report) on LaunchPad anyway.

I'll give it a whirl later this week.

Should we just post any issues/comments in this thread?

Great news ! Will keep busy over the WE :)

I've been waiting for long time that the development toolkit gets overhauled, as I mainly enjoyed developing appliances for the project. The fact that I moved to openstack at home (and being unable to create my own openstack images from the tklpatch source, at least in an automated pleasant way) moved me away from turnkey, but I still follow the project carefully, and keep contact with the main devs.

I think that when I have access to the early release of the dev toolkit I'll be happy to contribute back to the project. Also the fact that I'm going back to proxmox at home (My openstack studies have finished for now) will help to motivate myself on playing with patches again. I hope to read about that release soon!

Hi, we are focused on Alfresco deployments, and had to "go another route" to provide 64 bit Alfresco servers (Alfresco demands 64 bits on recent versions).

We look forward to work with you (Tim Hibberd ...) on a good configuration ... from our experience we must tune "kernel max open files", "Postgre memory settings", Tomcat memory settings ...

Cheers,

Paulo Cesar Emerique / www.esensetec.com.br

Not yet anyway. But once Debian 7 is released then Debian 6 (basis of TKL v12.x) will have 12 months of support. So you will have a 1 year window to test, modify (if necessary) and deploy on v13 before you lose the Debian supported security updates to the core OS.

Also TKL appliances that include upstream apps will benefit from upgrading sooner rather than later (the included upstream software will be the latest version, whereas the v12 version will be getting a little dated and may contain bugs...)

As for upgrading - the preferred way is to migrate your data to a new instance (rather than doing an in place upgrade) and that is what TKLBAM is designed for. Reality is though it doesn't always work flawlessly when going between versions, so I would suggest that you migrate your data to a new TKL instance running as a local VM. Then you can iron out any issues there may be prior to doing your real migration.

Here's how I'd do it:

1. TKLBAM backup of your existing appliance
2. Install v13 appliance (once released...) to a local VM (eg VirtualBox)
3. Restore your backup to this new instance
4. Get it fully functional (will depend on the appliance - may require very little work, may require a bit...). Make sure you thoroughly document everything you do... This can be done locally, or here on the forums (if you're looking for input and pointers). Regardless it'd be nice to share when you're done! :)
5. Once you have your new v13 VM working just how you want it, run another TKLBAM backup of your production site, then lock it (assuming it has dynamic content - otherwise skip this step...)
6. Restore your TKLBAM backup to your new v13 production server and follow the steps you documented earlier...
7. Enjoy! :)

But only under KVM and I haven't really done much with it...

So as such, there will be no TKL v13.0 stable release prior to a Debian Wheezy stable. And last I heard the devs are madly working on a v12.1 release ready to roll out the v13.0 release as soon as they can after Wheezy goes stable.

As of about a week ago, the Debian team announced an anticipated final/stable release of Debain 7.0 aka Wheezy for weekend 4/5 May 2013!

Please note that this date is not 100% firm, but given the history of Debian releases, highly likely. From http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2013/04/msg00006.html:

The intention is only to lift the date if something really critical pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up technically unable to release that weekend (e.g. a required machine crashes or d-i explodes in a giant ball of fire).

What this will exactly mean for the expected release date of TKL v13.0 is not completely clear as Alon and Liraz are yet to release the v12.x first and final update (v12.1).

But hopefully we will see TKL v12.1 here  really soon and the guys can refocus their efforts on getting v13.0 final out the door! :)

This TKL v13RC is actually built on a Wheezy beta (beta2 IIRC??). As I mentioned above, the guys are working on a v12.1 release ATM and so I doubt we'll see any movement here until that is public (hopefully will be soon though!)