Following up on a previous post announcing the availability of a first round of AWS AMIs for stretch, I’m happy to announce the availability of a second round of images. These images address all the feedback we’ve received about the first round. The notable changes include: Don’t install a local MTA. Don’t install busybox. Ensure that /etc/machine-id is recreated at launch. Fix the security.debian.org sources.list entry. Enable Enhanced Networking and ENA support.

At this past November’s Debian cloud sprint, we classified our image users into three broad buckets in order to help guide our discussions and ensure that we were covering the common use cases. Our users fit generally into one of the following groups: People who directly launch our image and treat it like a classic VPS. These users most likely will be logging into their instances via ssh and configuring it interactively, though they may also install and use a configuration management system at some point.

Following up on Steve McIntyre’s writeup of the Debian Cloud Sprint that took place in Seattle this past November, I’m pleased to announce the availability of preliminary Debian stretch AMIs for Amazon EC2. Pre-generated images are available in all public AWS regions, or you can use FAI with the fai-cloud-images configuration tree to generate your own images. The pre-generated AMIs were created on 25 January, shortly after Linux 4.9 entered stretch, and their details follow:

This post could easily have been titled “Why did this hurt so much?” or even simply, “What happened!?” It’s nice to come away from a race having learned something. Unfortunately, the lessons aren’t always pleasant. The best way I can phrase the lesson from this year’s Bavarian Bike & Brew race is like this If you want to find out whether your training is working, stop doing it for a year and see what happens.

Animagraffs makes really cool visualizations of complex things including all the various systems inside car engines, how jet engines work, and more.

A couple of notable things stand out from last weekend’s race. It was a super fast course and the weather was beautiful. It had rained the day/night before, so there was no dust and the traction felt infinite. (unlike a couple years ago, where a rider 20 feet in front of you would literally vanish in a dust cloud) I didn’t take any time to warm up before the race, and it starts with a mile of climbing right out of the gate.

A whole mess of stuff has changed since the Beezley Burn race. Mostly this involved training and bike fit stuff. I had a new saddle and freshly dialed geometry, and this was also the first race in which I rode with Time’s ATAC pedals. I was interested to see how things would go. This is also the race I’ve done the most in my time in Washington, so there’s a lot of data to compare it with.

Join Microsoft to celebrate Debian 8 at LinuxFest Northwest

Rode hard out of the starting gate and put a lot of hurt into my competitors (not to mention my own legs!). The first 2 km were on a wide open straight fire road with a headwind. Didn’t really want to be leading the charge into the wind, but I didn’t want to be following anybody else’s pace either. Shortly before we entered the singletrack, I let Peter Super and Steven Moe pass, and the three of us remained together for most of the first lap.

I’ve run OpenWRT on my home router for a long time, and these days I maintain a couple of packages for the project. In order to make most efficient use of the hardware resources on my router, I run a custom build of the OpenWRT firmware with some default features removed and others added. For example, I install bind and ipsec-tools, while I disable the web UI in order to save space.