[ANN] EC2 on Rails 0.9.8 available

[Paul Dowman]

EC2 on Rails version 0.9.8 is now available (or will be in a few hours when the RubyForge servers are synced). This is a recommended update for everyone.

Most importantly this fixes the problem with broken Ubuntu package updates which was caused due to a missing repository in the list of repositories. (Bug #20040)

The base image is now built using Eric Hammond's EC2 Ubuntu script (http://alestic.com/), this is a proven and popular Ubuntu base image with an active community (http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu). This lets me focus on the Rails stack and will ensure that new versions of Ubuntu and new EC2 features are supported more quickly. (And reduces the chance of bugs with the base image).

Also, there are major new features such as incremental MySQL backup (important for large databases), Apache SSL support, and a local Postfix SMTP server enabled by default.

My priorities now are:
1. Release an update based on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy (this version is still using Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy because I wanted to provide a reliable update as quickly as possible due to bug #20040. But now that the base image is built with Eric Hammond's script it should be easy to update to Hardy.)
2. Create complete documentation.
3. Release a 100% bug-free version 1.0 with the current feature-set. Please help by reporting any bugs you find, either using the RubyForge bug tracker or by email.

Full details:

* ami-b657b2df (32-bit) and ami-8957b2e0 (64-bit)
* This is another test release, still not intended to be production-ready. Look for version 1.0. Almost there!!
* Incremental database backups instead of doing a full mysqldump each time (full dump is done once nightly). (Thanks to Markus Bengts for the bug fix)
* Added monit monitoring daemon: monitors mysqld, apache, memcached, mongrels, system load and free drive space
* Enabled postfix by default, mail is delivered to admin user (or use new ec2onrails[:admin_mail_forward_address] option in deploy.rb to forward admin mail to an email address)
* Apache now supports SSL, set :ec2onrails[:enable_ssl] = true to enable and upload ssl cert & key (there is also a self-signed cert generated for each instance on first startup)
* Base image now built with Eric Hammond's EC2 Ubuntu script: http://alestic.com/ (using svn revision 44)
* Now installing latest rubygems (version 1.1.1) from source instead of using Ubuntu package
* Apache now denies access to any file in a directory named .svn, to protect the subversion info of those who deploy with Capistrano "checkout" method
* Added force-proxy-request-1.0 and proxy-nokeepalive for proxy requests to mongrel to fix occasional "proxy: error reading status line from remote server" error (mongrel doesn't support keep-alive anyway), see apache bug #37770
* Increased default memcache size to 128m, and memcache now listens on all interfaces for clustered use
* Tuned MySQL setting defaults for better performance
* restore_db_and_deploy task now runs migrations after restoring db
* upgrade_packages task now does "safe upgrade" instead of "full upgrade"
* Now requires Capistrano 2.3.0
* Bug fix: #20040: installing or upgrading packages no longer breaks - /etc/apt/sources.list is now correct
* Bug fix: #19808: Capistrano database tasks don't try to load database config if there are no hosts in the "db" role (with :primary => true, slave roles not yet supported)
* Bug fix: #19791: MySQL no longer fails after rebundling due to missing /mnt/mysql_data
* Bug fix: #14555: Syslog messages about unacknowledged DHCP requests is no longer occurring
* Bug fix: Database backup and restore scripts now exit if already backing up or restoring.
* Bug fix: EC2 ephemeral store and swap volumes were not correctly mounted
* Bug fix: Reload apache config when setting roles to find new app hosts.