Monthly Archives: May 2018

Migrating away from WordPress… but not really

For as long as I can remember I have hosted this blog on Dreamhost using WordPress. Last year I migrated to their Dreampress service but for the tiny amounts of traffic it wasn’t worth it. Well that and the non stop emails about my wordpress install being vulnerable.

The cost and the hassle are what prompted my move away from this set up. I wanted to start serving a  static blog using something like Hugo, Jekyll, Nikola or Pelican but that meant  importing all my wordpress posts and which I didn’t fancy doing so I settled on using a local install of WordPress (on my Freenas server) and the excellent Simply Static plugin to generate a static site from a WordPress install.

The install of WordPress is only accessible on my network so no more vulerability issues. I get all the benefits of WordPress like Social links and Analytics plugins with the added bonus of a blazing fast static site.

So far I have been very happy with the set up. If you notice any issues pelase let me know @philroche.

Ubuntu cloud images and how to find the most recent cloud image – part 2/3

TLDR;

sudo snap install image-status

This will install a snap of the very useful `image-status` utility.

image-status cloud-release bionic

This will show you the serial for the most recent Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic cloud image in QCOW format.

image-status ec2-release bionic

This will show you the AWS EC2 AMIs for the most recent Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic AWS EC2 cloud images.

Part two of a three part series.

Following on from part 1 where I detailed simplestreams and sstream-query I present to you the `image-status` utility which is a very neat and useful wrapper around sstream-query.

image-status is hosted on github as part of Scott Moser‘s talk-simplestreams repo.

I recently submitted a pull request which added the ability to package image-status as a snap. This was merged and you can now install image-status on any linux distribution supporting snaps using the following command.

sudo snap install image-status

Once installed you can start querying the simplestreams feeds for details on the most recent Ubuntu cloud images.

Usage:

image-status --help # to see all available options

image-status cloud-release bionic # to see most recent Ubuntu Bionic release images on http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/
image-status cloud-daily bionic # to see most recent Ubuntu Bionic daily images on http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/

image-status gce-release bionic # to see most recent Ubuntu Bionic release images on GCE
image-status gce-dailybionic # to see most recent UbuntuBionic daily images on GCE

image-status ec2-release bionic # to see most recent Ubuntu Bionic release AMIs on EC2
image-status ec2-daily bionic # to see most recent UbuntuBionic daily AMIs on EC2

image-status azure-release bionic # to see most recent Ubuntu Bionic release images on Azure
image-status azure-daily bionic # to see most recent UbuntuBionic daily images on Azure

image-status maas-release bionic # to see most recent Ubuntu Bionic release images for maas V2
image-status maas-daily bionic # to see most recent UbuntuBionic daily images for maas V2

image-status maas3-release bionic # to see most recent Ubuntu Bionic release images for maas V3
image-status maas3-daily bionic # to see most recent Ubuntu Bionic daily images for maas V3

I find this very useful when trying to quickly see what is the most recent Ubuntu release on any particular public cloud. eg:

image-status ec2-release bionic | grep eu-west-1 | grep hvm | grep ssd | awk '{split($0,a," "); print a[6]}'

This will return the ID for the most recent HVM EBS Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) in the eu-west-1 AWS EC2 region. This can be achieved using sstream-query too but I find filtering using grep to be easier to understand and iterate with.

I hope the above is helpful with your automation.