Mercury 1.1-Beta released

We are happy to announce a beta release of Mercury 1.1. This is a beta release and should not be used for production servers. However, we're hoping that folks will try the new servers and point out any bugs they find and/or make any suggestions they have.

Mercury 1.1 has quite a few improvements since mercury 1.0 (see: http://groups.drupal.org/node/60963). Since then we've improved/simplified the BCFG2 config files and bound tomcat6 to listen to localhost. We've posted how the new template system works and how you can use it to set your own memory limits for varnish, php, apc and/or memcached here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/62038. That post also describes how to have your own /etc/varnish/default.vlc mods without them being overwritten by BCFG2.

We've released AMI's of 1.1 Beta:

Yes, in fact, you do see Karmic servers on that list. :) However, there is 1 bug left that I've been unable to track down in the Karmic AMIs - pressflow isn't creating sites/default/files/css/css_*.css files. This doesn't appear to be a permissions issue nor an apparmor issue - any suggestions?

Note that these servers will require some hand configuration to bring them to 1.1 stable when it's released. We'll post on how to make that change by the release (which should be soon after Lucid is out on 4/28).

Linode is now supported. Our friend Justin Ellison (justin@techadvise.com) has done a wonderful job testing on Linode and making a stackscript that automates the install of Mercury on Linode servers - his script has been tested and works with the following combinations:

Ubuntu Jaunty w/ mercury 1.0 (stable)
Ubuntu Jaunty w/ mercury 1.1 (unstable)
Ubuntu Karmic w/ mercury 1.0 (stable)
Ubuntu Karmic w/ mercury 1.1 (unstable)

The stackscript is called Mercury (http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/view/?StackScriptID=353). As with the Amazon AMIs, the 1.1 beta servers will require some hand configuration to bring them to 1.1 stable when it's released

For Mercury 1.0 servers, a /usr/local/bin/update_mercury.sh will bring them to Mercury 1.1 when its released (until then, /usr/local/bin/update_mercury.sh will only pull in updates to Mercury 1.0 on Mercury 1.0 servers).

If you wish to make your own mercury 1.1 server, the following is different from the instructions we have at http://groups.drupal.org/node/50408 (which will be updated when 1.1 is released):

Section 5: replace:

with:

Sections 6: skip if your server matches one of our pre-configured profiles (note that AWS stands for Amazon Web Server and vps works on both Rackspace and Linode):
mercury-ubuntu-aws
mercury-ubuntu-vps

Yes, the distro and server-type (32 or 64 bit) are no longer needed thanks to some help from Sol Jerome (solj on #bcfg2).

Section 8: skip

Section 10: karmic requires that you run bcfg2 -vq twice

If you look in these files, you will notice some configs for Lucid (which is still in beta) - these are for internal testing and are not working yet. Ubuntu has changed how it manages services with Lucid ("service apache2 start" rather then "/etc/init.d/apache2 start") and the version of bcfg2 that supports this new method has not been added to Lucid yet. Both the bcfg2 and Ubuntu folks are aware of this and are working on a solution.

A huge shoutout of thanks to Justin Ellison and Sol Jerome for the many bugfixes and feature ideas (and to everyone who has participated on groups.drupal.org/pantheon!). Standing on the shoulders of giants indeed. :)