Ubuntu.com Suffers Intermittent Outages As Thousands Download Karmic Koala

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The Ubuntu 9.10 server and desktop editions, as well as the 9.10 versions of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Mythbuntu, and Ubuntu Studio, were released late last week, causing the Ubuntu.com site to suffer periodic downtime, according to web analytics firm Netcraft (www.netcraft.com ).

"Ubuntu.com was unavailable for some short periods during yesterday's release of Ubuntu 9.10 'Karmic Koala,'" Netcraft noted in a weekend blog post . Ubuntu.com is powered by an Ubuntu server running Apache 2.2.8. According to Netcraft's latest web server survey , a total of 1.4 million websites are served from known Ubuntu machines, of which nearly all run the open-source Apache web server. 

Periodic interruptions, however, did not keep many web hosts from downloading Karmic Koala. According to its Twitter feed (@rackcloud ), web hosting provider Rackspace (www.rackspace.com ) has already added Ubuntu 9.10 to its Rackspace Cloud Servers, letting users run virtual instances of Karmic Koala.

New with its version 9.10 release, Ubuntu Server Edition offers full Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud technology support. UEC is an open-source cloud computing environment, based on the same Application Programming Interfaces as Amazon EC2, allowing businesses to start taking advantage of the flexibility of private clouds, while avoiding the security, regulatory or policy restrictions inherent in keeping data in a public cloud.

Ubuntu Server Edition is available on the Amazon EC2 environment as an Amazon Machine Image. Having the same images available on UEC or on Amazon's public cloud means that work done can be deployed in either environment, improving application portability and flexibility.

Falko Timme created a guide to upgrading Ubuntu 9.04 desktop and server installations to Ubuntu 9.10.