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Hub 1.0 follow-up: two top issues users reported + what we're doing about it.

Last week we announced the release of TurnKey Hub v1.0. The response was great, signups went through the roof and many of you went the extra mile and provided detailed feedback on your first impressions from the new version.

Announcing TurnKey Hub v1.0 - now officially out of private beta

Hub Front

When we first announced the TurnKey Hub private beta about 9 months ago, we had limited capacity (invitation only) and a modest feature set. Since then we tested, bugfixed, removed bottlenecks and added features, constantly improving the Hub with the help and feedback from our excellent beta users. Thank you so much!

Growl type notifications in Django

First, a little background

Django has an excellent messages framework which provides support for cookie and session-based messaging, for both anonymous and authenticated users.

The messages framework allows you to temporarily store messages in one request, and retrieve them for display in a subsequent request (usually the next one). Every message is tagged with a specific level determining its priority (e.g. success, info, error).

For example, in a view you can send a message:

Time for a human readable privacy policy?

Up until now TurnKey hasn't had an explicit privacy policy, and that seemed ok because no one ever asked about it. But now that the latest release integrates TurnKey appliances more closely with the TurnKey Hub (e.g., TKLBAM, geo-ip auto apt mirror) and the Hub gets access to sensitive data as part of its normal operation, I felt it was about time we gave this some more thought.

TurnKey Linux 11 released (part one)

Ladies and gentlemen, part 1 of the TurnKey Linux 11 release is now officially out, including 45 new images based on Ubuntu 10.04.1. We pushed out the 11.0 release candidates 3 months ago, and with the help of the community have tested the images and resolved the few remaining issues.

Secure, flexible and scalable Amazon EC2 instance preseeding

I'd like to introduce Joe. He is a good looking, experienced sys-admin and like all good sysadmins, he has more stuff to do than time to do it.

Joe wants to get up and running on Amazon EC2 with a Wordpress installation, and chooses to do so with a pre-configured appliance. These are the steps Joe performs:

Tweaking Django exceptions with custom middleware

When settings.DEBUG is set to False, exception tracebacks will be sent to settings.ADMINS. To make it simpler to track down how and why the exception was raised, it's beneficial to know which user caused the exception.

It's quite simple to do this using some custom middleware. In the Hub, we include the associated users email address in the exception with the following:

Finding the closest APT package archive using GeoIP and indexing

In preparation for TurnKey's upcoming release based on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS, we are knocking off todo list items. One of them is code-named auto-apt-archive. As you can guess from its name, the objective is to configure the closest APT package archive mirror, automatically, without user intervention. It does this by leveraging a new GeoIP service provided by the TurnKey Hub.

TKLBAM: a new kind of smart backup/restore system that just works

Drum roll please...

Today, I'm proud to officially unveil TKLBAM (AKA TurnKey Linux Backup and Migration): the easiest, most powerful system-level backup anyone has ever seen. Skeptical? I would be too. But if you read all the way through you'll see I'm not exaggerating and I have the screencast to prove it. Aha!

Finding the closest data center using GeoIP and indexing

We are about to release the TurnKey Linux Backup and Migration (TKLBAM) mechanism, which boasts to be the simplest way, ever, to backup a TurnKey appliance across all deployments (VM, bare-metal, Amazon EC2, etc.), as well as provide the ability to restore a backup anywhere, essentially appliance migration or upgrade.

Note: We'll be posting more details really soon - In this post I just want to share an interesting issue we solved recently.

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