Comment 5 for bug 434693

>> I think a little background information on ec2 and rightscale might
>> be useful.
> Thanks for the heads-up. I roughly know the setup, but my main concern
> is that this is not at all a "software package" in the real sense, but
> more like an installer or image builder thing.

I think you really are missing what Scott is saying.

We provide an image for EC2. People will be booting the exact image
we're providing. Sure, we can avoid touching the SSH host keys. I'm just
not sure I would personally be very happy knowing that the private keys
used by my ssh server were well-known.

>> ec2-init is a packaged intended to run only inside of ec2 or an
>> ec2-compatible "cloud".
> Couldn't the package be by and large turned upside down, and instead
> of playing evil tricks to change the system that it gets installed on,
> rather wrap vmware-builder and change the system that it is building?

Err... I don't think I even understand what you mean? ec2-init doesn't..
I mean.. No, wait, what do /you/ mean?

>> The rightscale-init can largely be viewed here as a "post-install" or
>> "first-boot" script for a full OS install.
> Why isn't it possible to do most of this setup when building the
> image?

Because we're building just one image, and people use this same image as
the base for all kinds of different things on EC2. We don't want to
force a web-, database-, or anyting else-server down everone's throats,
we don't want to have the entire world use the same SSH private keys..

>> We have been discussing a way for the ec2-init to make the ec2-init
>> package inert if it believes that it is not running on a ec2
>> compatible cloud.
> Right, I'm afraid this needs to be the minimum requirement. But even
> with that, it's still quite a hack and circumvents the normal way we
> use to do safe package installation.

EC2 is a crazy place. We're just trying to work in it.