ec2-init: ec2-set-defaults needs better defaults for non US/EU regions

[Eric Hammond]

This report applies to the code found in the dev testing ami-af3fdec6

The code in /usr/sbin/ec2-set-defaults has reasonable options for regions starting with "us" and "eu" but it lacks defaults for other regions.

Amazon is sure to add more EC2 regions in non US/EU areas and this code should pick a default for them. Even if it ends up not being the right choice it should still work until the code can be enhanced to pick a better option.

The code in question looks like:

  if zone.startswith("us"):
        archive = "http://us.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu"
  elif zone.startswith("eu"):
        archive = "http://eu.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu"

and

          if location.startswith("us"):
            lang='en_US.UTF-8'
        elif location.startswith("eu"):
            lang='en_GB.UTF-8'

Note the lack of an "else" in these conditionals.

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

The 'archive' hunk above is a duplicate of bug 387027. But the locale issue is still present.

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

suggested patch is attached.

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

This affects the uec instances of the ec2/uec images negatively. You can see the obvious problem here:

    def get_location_from_availability_zone(self, availability_zone):
        if availability_zone.startswith('us-'):
            return 'us'
        elif availability_zone.startswith('eu-'):
            return 'eu'
        raise Exception('Could not determine location')

That exception is not caught in the caller (ec2-set-defaults.py):

def main():
    ec2 = ec2init.EC2Init()

    availability_zone = ec2.get_availability_zone()
    location = ec2.get_location_from_availability_zone(availability_zone)

The result is that ec2-set-defaults dies before 'apply_locale' is called.

As such, locale-gen and update-locale are not called in the instance. That causes things like:

$ man asdf
man: can't set the locale; make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct
No manual entry for asdf

To fix that, you can do what ec2-init would have done:
$ sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
Generating locales...
  en_US.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.
$ sudo update-locale en_US.UTF-8
$ echo "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" | sudo tee /etc/default/locale

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

See Attached patch for fix. We may chose to do other things in upstream ec2-init, but for karmic this will fix the problem noted in comment 3.

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

Note, i've tested the patch at comment 4 and verified it functions on ec2 and uec.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package ec2-init - 0.4.999-0ubuntu4

---------------
ec2-init (0.4.999-0ubuntu4) karmic; urgency=low

  * set locale to en_US.UTF-8 if get_location_from_availability_zone
    doesn't have a match (LP: #407949)

 -- Scott Moser <email address hidden> Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:57:49 -0400