[owl-users] Owl 3-stable 20111026 on Amazon EC2

Hello,

This is an announcement of my preliminary work of an EBS backed AMI of
Owl 3-stable (from 2011-10-26).  I've made a public image (ami-f4fd87a6)
of Owl 3-stable i686 available at Amazon EC2 Asia Pacific (Singapore).

The image is a slightly modified default install of Owl 3-stable (I've
added DHCP client to get a dynamic IP address assigned to the instance
when it's started + created a script to retrieve and install an
associated SSH public key to the root account on the first boot).

No other modification were performed to the system, so it's almost
vanilla 'make installworld'.

It should be noted that since Owl 3-stable is still using old glibc and
gcc (in comparison to Owl-current) there is no easy way to build the
provided kernel with Xen support.  Hence, for the time being, the image
is using one of Amazon Linux kernels.

I believe it's possible to simply upgrade an instance created from the
announced AMI to Owl-current, then build a kernel with Xen support.  The
image supports custom kernel images (simply edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to
add another kernel image -- and to play safe set a fallback to the
currently used kernel image).

I'd appreciate any feedback re: Owl on EC2.  My plans include creating
the x86_64 image of Owl 3-stable as well as maintaining Owl-current
images.  If there is any interest in these AMI I'll notify this list re:
the progress.

-- 
(GM)