Brian Parsons

Update August 21, 2016

I am no longer maintaining Arch Linux images for Amazon EC2, and I no longer recommend using Arch Linux on servers. The attitude in some of the core pieces of the system has become far less disciplined and... what I will in a politically correct way say is more centered around agenda than users or system use.

Specifically the issue that broke this for me is the way versions of pacman since the file reorganization effort remove symlinks in the root path install path of a package. This bug has been brought up several times in pacman's history. The author and current Arch czar has stated that symlinks are improper and should be replaced with bind mounts. This approach breaks the best practice of being able to separate the OS from the data, and using bind mounts causes disk metrics, analysis and monitoring to misreport. In previous instances, this bug was fixed, however so far this time it is not being addressed.

I continue to be a proponent of Arch Linux for desktop use, but I have stopped using it on servers. I'm currently deploying using CentOS and most of the scripts I have open sourced for system management have been updated to work with CentOS.

Below is for Historical Purpose only.

These Arch Linux images for Amazon EC2 use my ec2-init script which requires python2 and boto, but other than that they are stock Arch Linux with just the base load and LTS kernel.

Usage Notes:

The ec2-init script will find the following variables in the user-metadata for the instance:

• hostname - The hostname to set for the instance
• mailto - the address to email with a message listing the instance information and ip address
• mailfrom - the from address of the email message

The user-metadata should be pipe delimited like this:

hostname=myhost.example.com|mailto=myemail@example.com|mailfrom=ec2host@example.com

Additionally if the instance is granted IAM role permission to Route53, the script will create or update a DNS entry for the hostname if it finds a matching zone in Route53.

Pacman is functional but key signing has not been initialized. I recommend you install haveged and initialize the package signing:

# pacman-key --init

# pacman-key --populate

The pacman-key --init command will take a while or seem like it is hung while the system gathers enough entropy for the random number generator. To help it out, you can log into another session and do an ls -lR / as it uses system activity.

See Pacman-key on the Arch Linux Wiki for more information.