New release announcement (codename: Idan)

Following 9 months of development, and a sleepless night ensuring the release was performed as intended, the Swartz family is thrilled to announce that 'Idan' has been made public.

The aforementioned release has an undetermined support period, but likely to have onsite tier-1 support for approximately 18+ years, and thereafter tier-2 support for as long as required.

Configuring Subversion access via Apache on the Revision Control appliance

The following is the first guest blog post by Adrian Moya, a web developer and open source evangelist. He took first place in the TurnKey Development content, 2010. See more of Adrian's work on his website.

TurnKey Hub: Not just adding random features

I started writing a review for cloudtask as a comment on the announcement, but decided it would be better to address a topic that was raised by Jeremiah when we launched the Hub API:

Introducing CloudTask - a cloud batch execution tool

The cloud. Isn't that just a new name everyone on the latest hype bandwagon is slapping on the same old stuff? Yes. Or rather, at least the way some clueless marketing types are using it that is. With so much smoke you'd forgive the cynics for thinking there's no fire. But... there are a few genuinely interesting things an IT guy can do today that just weren't practical a few years back.

TurnKey 11.2, free micro instances, EBS backed cloud servers

TurnKey 11.2: micro instances, EBS support, built-in TurnKey DNS, security updates

We just updated the web site and the TurnKey Hub with the new TurnKey 11.2 maintenance release, which includes:

  1. TurnKey Hub support for micro instances, Amazon's free tier and cloud servers backed by persistent network-attached storage volumes (AKA EBS backed instances).
  2. Built-in support for TurnKey's new dynamic DNS service.
  3. The latest security updates.

Using Comet to update web application data in real time?

Recently I've been looking into a powerful but complex web application technology we're considering using in future versions of the Hub.

The problem: how do we update a browser view when a background process updates the database?

A few examples of places in the Hub where this comes up...

Python iterators considered harmful

I just tracked down a nasty bug in my code to a gotcha with Python iterators.

Consider the following code...

How to write a good changelog

In a nutshell, think of your users.

They read top to bottom. They have a very limited attention span. Even if they read all the way through, they're probably going to pay more attention to things that come early. Before patience runs thin.

So your goal is not only to describe changes but to figure out now to communicate as much value to users before they lose interest. If you do a really good job, you might actually prevent them from losing interest and they'll read all the way through. Don't bet on it though...

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Another batch of changes to the TurnKey website

These past few weeks I've been having too much fun offline with my development clone of the TurnKey website, ticking items off of my todo list. Today I finally got around to the complex, tedious, and unfortunately uninteresting task of updating the online version of the website. Ah, a necessary evil I suppose.

On to the changes...

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Important security notice: Your TurnKey system may no longer be receiving automatic security updates

I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that if your TurnKey installation is older than 2 weeks you may no longer be receiving security updates.

The good news is that you are reading this and there is a very easy fix. Either reboot your system, or log in and restart the cron service:

/etc/init.d/cron start

Until you start recron, security updates and other scheduler related services (e.g., daily backups) will not work.

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