Deprecation of AWS Paravirtual Images

Nine years ago Bitnami started providing cloud images for open source software. The first cloud supported by Bitnami was AWS.

A lot has changed since then, including the virtualisation technology used to provide AMIs. AWS started using a technology called paravirtual (PV) images, but later moved to a  new virtualization type, hardware virtual machine (HVM).

Today, HVM is the recommended solution for virtualization due to its superior performance. Also, after recent security vulnerabilities in the Linux Kernel, AWS has published a security bulletin recommending users to migrate to HVM instances due to insufficient system protection to address process-to-process risks in PV images.

For these reasons and because we are committed to provide optimized and secure images, Bitnami has decided to stop providing updates for PV images after October 1st. Existing images will continue to be available, however they will no longer be updated with security fixes.

Affected Servers

Deprecating PV images does not impact running servers, however we strongly recommend you  move your applications to an instance based on a HVM image.

In order to check if you are running a paravirtual server, you can look for the “Virtualization” property in the EC2 console description tab for your instance. In the official AWS documentation you can find the recommended upgrade path when moving from PV to HVM machines.

Affected Accounts and Next Steps

New regions and current instance types only support HVM. Please note that some of instance types can only be launched in a VPC.

If your EC2 account was created before 2013-12-04, you might need to configure your account to support VPC. If that is the case, we advise that you:

• Create a new AWS account. This will create an EC2-VPC account which comes with a default VPC in each region.
• Select a region that you haven’t used before to launch your servers. When using a new region a VPC will be created by default.
• Contact AWS support to migrate your EC2-Classic account to EC2-VPC. This may require removing old resources in your account.

You can find more information about enabling VPC support in your account and how to migrate a linux instance from EC2-Classic to a VPC in the official AWS documentation.
Questions

For questions relating to your account, we recommend to contact AWS directly.Bitnami does not have access to your EC2 account details.

For any questions about PV support, please don’t hesitate to contact us in our community forum.

FTP server with built in image preview

An FTP server with built in image preview? Yes please!

One of the neat features of CrushFTP that a Bitnami user discovered a few weeks ago was the ability to automatically generate thumbnails of image files. As it turns out it requires a few extra bits and pieces to get working (ImageMagick, Ghostscript, and Exiftool), which aren’t normally included by default.

However, these bits are now included by default in the Bitnami CrushFTP packages, which makes them dead simple to use. The full instructions on how to enable folders to scan are in our wiki, but in a nutshell all you need to do is…

1. Log into the CrushFTP server
2. Navigate to the "Admin -> Preferences -> Preview" page using the top navigation menu.
3. Click ‘Add Folder’ to select the folders you wish to scan
4. Click ‘Save’ to apply and start the scanning.

Then, when you navigate to that folder, you’ll see image previews generated for all the images it can find.

If you are already using CrushFTP, feel free to write a review and let other Bitnami users know what you thought about this feature.

Still haven't tried it? CrushFTP is ready to install in a few clicks with the Bitnami CrushFTP installers (available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X), Virtual Machine images (VMs), and cloud images for Amazon EC2 and Google Cloud Platform.