thinking sysadmin

So I returned from a little five-day weekend to sunny Lake Chelan and the Columbia River to an RSS reader bursting at the seams with new posts. By far the best post was one later deleted:

• Amazon Elastic Block Store goes live! (Yeah, that link’s dead – like I said, it was later deleted.) The RightScale folks appear to have inadvertently published a draft (on 8/8, the day after I left town) of their blog post designed to coincide with the release of Amazon’s Elastic Block Store for EC2. They later deleted it, but Google Reader kindly cached the post for me. I won’t repeat anything in the post, nor would I bank on anything written there – would you gamble anything important on a retracted post about a not-yet-released product? I will add one comment: Will EBS attract attention of the lawsuit kind from NetApp? (I mean that comment only partially in jest – and you’d probably have to have seen the original post to know what I’m talking about.)

For grins, I tried a quick-and-dirty BFU of a SXCE 79 instance running on EC2 to the latest nightly build this morning. I roughly followed Ben Rockwood’s BFU instructions and didn’t do anything to resolve conflicts beyond running acr. On reboot, it looks like the system panicked – I presume the reason is probably somewhere in here. Console dump after the jump for the curious.
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I missed this: Apparently the OpenSolaris 2008.05 AMI on EC2 has reached a capacity limit. So, while I got Sun’s approval this morning for their OpenSolaris/SXCE.79 on EC2 beta, I don’t get to use OpenSolaris until they add more capacity; SXCE.79 is a nice consolation prize, though.

Generally, I’m a fan of Sun Microsystems. For the most part, I like their hardware and their software – and their best products show real innovation and willingness to take risks. I’m also a fan of Amazon’s EC2 product, so the announcement that Sun would be officially bundling OpenSolaris for EC2 was great news. Unfortunately, it seems that after all the hullabaloo, Sun doesn’t really want to make it that easy for you to actually use OpenSolaris on EC2, by managing access to it like a control freak would.
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