eWEEK - April 18 2011

and installed the latest Ubuntu secur-
ity updates at boot time. It also offered
a simple command-line administration
console through which I could config-
ure networking and find the addresses
where I could access the appliance' s
S3 buckets. It' s not possible, for
instance, to view and browse through
your TKLBAM backups using the
AWS Web console or other S3 man-
agement tools. Rather, the data is
stored in a bucket associated with the
I intended to replace them through
the restore operation.

Web-based administration tools.

Turnkey Linux Hub services.

I fired up my Mediawiki appliance on one of our vSphere hosts, made some customizations, added a few pages and then headed off to back up my changes. I logged in to my server via SSH (Secure Shell) and used the command line to initialize the TKLBAM (Turnkey Linux Backup and Migration) service by providing the API key I was assigned when creating my account at hub. turnkeylinux.org. (I also could have configured backups through a Webmin module.)

The backup application taps the open-source backup application Duplicity to handle the backupsÐ and any storage target supported by that project could be used to store the backupsÐ but using a back end other than the default Amazon S3 brings additional configuration complexity.

Once my Mediawiki server was up, I connected to it via SSH and ran the TKLBAM-restore command to restore the backup I'd created of my vSphere-hosted instance. Following a reboot of the virtual server, my Mediawiki instance ran on EC2 with all the same files, data and user accounts I'd configured locally.

The console for launching and managing EC2 instances itself is fairly straightforward. There are controls for restarting or terminat-

ing running instances, viewing instance details and console output, and checking whether backups are enabled.

All backups created by the application are encrypted before being uploaded to S3, with an option for further secur-ing the data with a pass-phrase, which I did. From there, creating a new backup is as easy as running the command TKLBAM-backup. In our lab, the port for NTP (Network Time

I used OVF-formatted Turnkey Linux images to deploy the appliances on VMware vSphere.

Protocol) is blocked by default, and the Turnkey backup app looks to verify the time with a time server, so I added a hosts file entry that pointed pool.ntp.org at our internal time source before the backup would run.

I'd like to see the Turnkey Linux project provide an appliance that performs the Hub functionality, opening the door to using these services completely within an orga-nization's firewall, if desired.

I was interested to find a utility in the Turnkey Linux Hub interface for configuring the security policies that control network access for EC2 instances. I could also add an elastic IP address (one that persists across reboots) and an EBS (Elastic Block Store) volume (similarly persisting)

from this console.

Restore functionality

I didn' t want this modification to
carry over to potential restore hosts
running outside our network, so this
time-server workaround gave me a
chance to test out the TKLBAM option
for excluding data from the backup.
This was straightforward enough, and
required adding a line to the config file
ª /etc/tklbam/overrides.º
Turnkey Linux appliances don' t
use EBS volumes for their own sys-
tem files, instead relying on EC2' s
temporary storage for that purpose.
The backup function takes away
some of the need for persistent stor-
age, but the ª no EBS by defaultº
arrangement makes Turnkey Linux
appliances incompatible with
Amazon' s lowest-cost, ª microº
instances, which are great for try-
ing out most Web applications. «

EWEEK LABS EDITOR IN CHIEF JASON BROOKS CAN BE REACHED AT JBROOKS@ EWEEK.COM.

TKLBAM stores backups on Ama-
zon S3, but not in user-controlled
I tested out the service' s restore
functionality by launching a new
Mediawiki instance on Amazon EC2
through the Web interface of the
Turnkey Hub service. The operation
was simple enough: I selected the
Mediawiki appliance from a drop-
down menu of supported Web appli-
cations and chose a small instance
size. I had to provide passwords for
the Mediawiki instance' s MySQL
and admin accounts, even though