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news
development
ubuntu
contest
tklpatch
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TKLPatch summer contest summary: let the judging begin!

Liraz Siri - Thu, 2010/09/30 - 19:56 - 6 comments

It all started with a happy accident

I have a confession to make. This contest, which is directly fueling the largest expansion of the TurnKey library since the project started, is a happy accident. It wasn't something we planned. It wasn't on our summer todo list. It was just one of those unexpected, spontaneous ideas that light up the inside of your brain like a flash bulb, and demand you take action. Or else! (you won't get any sleep)

Back in June we had just launched the TurnKey Hub and were getting ready to focus all our energies on releasing TKLBAM. I logged into PayPal and noticed our donated beer budget had a sad little beer belly. It was just sitting there, giving me an accusing look. I felt guilty. Surely all those people who donated expected we would put these funds to better use. That's when it hit me. It was too much to buy beer, but not so much that we couldn't risk it all on a fun experiment...

I talked it over with Alon and on an impulse we decided to do a contest, but not just any contest. A wild and wet summer open source bonanza! With ponies!

What happened next took us both by surprise.

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Blog Tags: 
desktop
lxde

LXDE review: it zips, it flies! (base for client-side TurnKey appliances?)

Liraz Siri - Thu, 2010/09/23 - 01:22 - 4 comments

At home we canceled our cable subscription a few months ago. We hardly ever used it any more. Instead we were downloading content to a makeshift media server and watching it on our own schedule. Many of the shows I like (e.g., Colbert Report) aren't even available over here.

Upstairs we had a gorgeous big screen HDTV set that was being powered by one of my old computers, a nice P4 machine with 1GB of memory that was running the TurnKey Torrent Server appliance on bare metal.

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Blog Tags: 
backup
security
passphrase
tklbam

Passphrase dictionary attack countermeasures in tklbam's keying mechanism

Liraz Siri - Mon, 2010/09/13 - 11:14

Background: how a backup key works

In TKLBAM the backup key is a secret encrypted with a passphrase which is uploaded to the Hub.  Decrypting the backup key yields the secret which is passed on to duplicity (and eventually to GnuPG) to be used as the symmetric key with which backup volumes are encrypted on backup and decrypted on restore.

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Blog Tags: 
news
s3
backup
cloud
hub
ubuntu
tklbam
amazon

TKLBAM: a new kind of smart backup/restore system that just works

Liraz Siri - Wed, 2010/09/08 - 16:32 - 44 comments

Drum roll please...

Today, I'm proud to officially unveil TKLBAM (AKA TurnKey Linux Backup and Migration): the easiest, most powerful system-level backup anyone has ever seen. Skeptical? I would be too. But if you read all the way through you'll see I'm not exaggerating and I have the screencast to prove it. Aha!

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Blog Tags: 
backup
tklbam

Backups are hard, making sure you got it right - harder

Alon Swartz - Tue, 2010/08/31 - 19:46 - 1 comments

According to Murphy's Law, everything that can go wrong, eventually will go wrong.

This is true for backups on multiple levels. A backup is often our last line of defense when things go wrong, but so many things can go wrong with the backup itself that we usually don't find out about it until, well, horror of horrors, the backup fails.

On the surface, backups can fail for zillions of reasons.

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Blog Tags: 
s3
django
ec2
cloud
hub
tklbam
amazon
storage

Finding the closest data center using GeoIP and indexing

Alon Swartz - Mon, 2010/08/16 - 08:08 - 7 comments

We are about to release the TurnKey Linux Backup and Migration (TKLBAM) mechanism, which boasts to be the simplest way, ever, to backup a TurnKey appliance across all deployments (VM, bare-metal, Amazon EC2, etc.), as well as provide the ability to restore a backup anywhere, essentially appliance migration or upgrade.

Note: We'll be posting more details really soon - In this post I just want to share an interesting issue we solved recently.

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Blog Tags: 
ubuntu
community
interview

Ask us anything

Liraz Siri - Tue, 2010/08/10 - 16:38 - 15 comments

We're going to be doing a series of interviews with prominent TurnKey community members so we figured it would make sense to do an interview with the founders of TurnKey (that's us!).

Interviewing ourselves is a bit weird, so instead we're inviting the TurnKey community to propose the questions which we'll answer in a separate blog post.

So... ask us anything!

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Blog Tags: 
development
django

Django settings.py for development and production

Alon Swartz - Mon, 2010/08/02 - 10:17

So you developed a Django web application and now need to deploy it into production, but still need to actively continue development (bugfixes, tweaks, adding and testing new features, etc.)

In your development environment you probably had debugging enabled, performance settings disabled, used SQLite as your database, and other settings that make development easier and faster. 

But in production you need to disable debugging, enable performance, and use a real database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, etc.

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Blog Tags: 
ubuntu
community
education
open source

GNU high school: teaching kids by contributing to open source

Liraz Siri - Mon, 2010/07/26 - 13:19 - 7 comments

Today I'd like to spotlight TurnKey's unlikely relationship with Chelsea School, a high school in suburban Maryland. I'm going to try to tell this story on two levels:

  1. The straightforward who-what-why.
  2. Why you should care.

I'll start with the latter. If it works maybe you'll stick around for the full story.

Kids collaborate with NASA, discover cave on Mars

Recently, a 7th grade science class, using the raw data from a NASA satellite, made a remarkable discovery: a mysterious cave on Mars.

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Blog Tags: 
web
ubuntu
tip

Tip: use custom search engines for efficiency

Alon Swartz - Mon, 2010/07/19 - 09:25 - 3 comments
I don't need to tell you how search improves our efficiency on the web, but using custom search engines can make your day even more efficient.
 
Configuring your browser to use custom search engines is a massive time gain, and improves your work flow.
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