Turnkey Linux…

While it’s true I do work in tech and am responsible for a several websites besides this one I’m not really as technically savvy as I like to pretend. That’s why when a cool tool comes along, one that makes life easier, I’m generally quite glad.
Recently I came across Turnkey Linux which is more or less a set of distributions, each targeted to a specific use. Based on Ubuntu you can get turnkey setups that are targeted for development, for blogging, for hosting files, you get the idea. Essentially it’s everything you need and a bit more. You can install onto your own hardware, a virtual machine, or…and this is the cool part…into a cloud.
That all sounded fine but that’s not really the cool part. Because I’d signed up I discovered I was asked to be part of the Turnkey HUB beta. This really takes things to the next step.
Basically it’s a way of moving one of these distributions around, backup and migration made simple.
I already use Amazon s3 for backing up the production sites I work on (two non-profit sites). It’s easy to use and quite cheap. I think it’s been costing me about $0.50 a month each for both sites I caretake. I’m using a ruby based cronjob to tar each site and db. It works well but does require a bit of tinkering. This HUB system does away with the tinkering…well that’s not quite true…you can tinker if you like but you can also just let it do it’s thing.
As a test tonight I tried setting up a the Turnkey LAMP distro in a Parallels virtual machine on my MacBook. It was quite easy and I discovered that it runs a shell over the browser. Sweet. I can tinker on break from work…or at least I hope I can. I’ll find out tomorrow.
Next I set up a user account on that system and put up a test page. So far so good.
I backed up the system to s3 (the default) and it was smooth.
Now, this is the kicker, I set up another bare system on Amazon EC2 as a first step. Next I restored the system I backed up from my MacBook to the EC2 system and sure enough, there was my modified system running on EC2. Sweet.
Of course EC2 costs a bit of change, $0.08 an hour. That’s not much but it is more than I’d pay for my webhosting system so I don’t plan on running a site off of EC2. But I am going to use it as a movable development system. By having the same turnkey system on a variety of machines and using the s3 backup to maintain the changes I should be able to play around just about anywhere…even when I don’t have my own computer with me. Sweet.
Aloha!