Dustin Kirkland

39 posts

Ubuntu Product and Strategy

Dustin Kirkland is part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Product and Strategy team, working for Mark Shuttleworth, and leading the technical strategy, road map, and life cycle of the Ubuntu Cloud and IoT commercial offerings. Formerly the CTO of Gazzang, a venture funded start-up acquired by Cloudera, Dustin designed and implemented an innovative key management system for the cloud, called zTrustee, and delivered comprehensive security for cloud and big data platforms with eCryptfs and other encryption technologies. Dustin is an active Core Developer of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, maintainer of 20+ open source projects, and the creator of Byobu, DivItUp.com, and LinuxSearch.org. A Fightin’ Texas Aggie Class of 2001 graduate, Dustin lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife Kim, daughters, and his Australian Shepherds, Aggie and Tiger. Dustin is also an avid home brewer.

Dustin Kirkland
17 January 2018

Spectre mitigation updates available for testing in Ubuntu Proposed

Article Cloud and server

Canonical holds Ubuntu to the highest standards of security and quality. This week we published candidate Ubuntu kernels providing mitigation for CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5753 (ie, Spectre / Variants 1 & 2) to their respective -proposed pockets for Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful), 16.04 LTS (Xenial), and 14.04 LTS (Trusty)....

Dustin Kirkland
17 January 2018

Dustin Kirkland
4 January 2018

Ubuntu Updates for the Meltdown / Spectre Vulnerabilities

Article Canonical announcements

For up-to-date patch, package, and USN links, please refer to: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase/SpectreAndMeltdown Unfortunately, you’ve probably already read about one of the most widespread security issues in modern computing history — colloquially known as “Meltdown” (CVE-2017-5754) and...

Dustin Kirkland
4 January 2018

Dustin Kirkland
13 September 2017

Running Ubuntu Containers with Hyper-V Isolation on Windows

Article Cloud and server

Canonical and Microsoft have teamed up to deliver an truly special experience — running Ubuntu containers with Hyper-V Isolation on Windows 10 and Windows Servers! We have published a fantastic tutorial at https://ubu.one/UhyperV, with screenshots and easy-to-follow instructions. You should be up and running in...

Dustin Kirkland
13 September 2017

Dustin Kirkland
21 July 2017

Dustin Kirkland: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Desktop Default Application Survey

Article Desktop

Back in March, we asked the HackerNews community, “What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?”: https://ubu.one/AskHNA passionate discussion ensued, the results of which are distilled into this post: http://ubu.one/thankHNIn fact, you can check that link, http://ubu.one/thankHN and see our progress so far this cycle. We...

Dustin Kirkland
21 July 2017

Dustin Kirkland
25 February 2017

HOWTO: Automatically import your public SSH keys into LXD Instances

Article Cloud and server

Just another reason why LXD is so awesome…You can easily configure your own cloud-init configuration into your LXD instance profile.In my case, I want cloud-init to automatically ssh-import-id kirkland, to fetch my keys from Launchpad. Alternat

Dustin Kirkland
25 February 2017

Dustin Kirkland
24 February 2017

Dustin Kirkland: The questions that you’re afraid to ask about containers

Article Cloud and server

Yesterday, I delivered a talk to a lively audience at ContainerWorld in Santa Clara, California.If I measured “the most interesting slides” by counting “the number of people who took a picture of the slide”, then by far “the most interesting slides” ar

Dustin Kirkland
24 February 2017

Dustin Kirkland
8 December 2016

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Security: A Comprehensive Overview

Article Cloud and server

From Linux kernel livepatches to encryption to ASLR to compiler optimizations and configuration hardening, we strive to ensure that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is the most secure Linux distribution out of the box.These slides try to briefly explain:what we do to

Dustin Kirkland
8 December 2016

Dustin Kirkland
31 October 2016

Dirty COW was livepatched in Ubuntu within hours of publication

Article Cloud and server

If you haven’t heard about last week’s Dirty COW vulnerability, I hope all of your Linux systems are automatically patching themselves…Why? Because every single Linux-based phone, router, modem, tablet, desktop, PC, server, virtual machine, and absolutely everything in between — including all versions of Ubuntu since...

Dustin Kirkland
31 October 2016

Dustin Kirkland
9 August 2016

Howdy, Windows! A Six-part Series about Ubuntu-on-Windows for Linux.com

Article Cloud and server

I hope you’ll enjoy a shiny new 6-part blog series I recently published at Linux.com.The first article is a bit of back story, perhaps a behind-the-scenes look at the motivations, timelines, and some of the work performed between Microsoft and Canonica

Dustin Kirkland
9 August 2016

Dustin Kirkland
24 June 2016

HOWTO: Host your own SNAP store!

Article Cloud and server

SNAPs are the cross-distro, cross-cloud, cross-device Linux packaging format of the future. And we’re already hosting a fantastic catalog of SNAPs in the SNAP store provided by Canonical. Developers are welcome to publish their software for

Dustin Kirkland
24 June 2016

HOWTO: Host your own SNAP store!

Article Desktop

Dustin Kirkland
24 June 2016

Dustin Kirkland
20 June 2016

HOWTO: Classic, apt-based Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Server on the rpi2!

Article Cloud and server

Classic Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, on an rpi2Hopefully by now you’re well aware of Ubuntu Core — the snappiest way to run Ubuntu on a Raspberry Pi…But have you ever wanted to run classic (apt/deb) Ubuntu Server on a RaspberryPi2?Well, you’re in luck! &n

Dustin Kirkland
20 June 2016

HOWTO: Classic, apt-based Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Server on the rpi2!

Article Desktop

Dustin Kirkland
20 June 2016

Dustin Kirkland
18 June 2016

The Changelog Podcast — Ubuntu Everywhere

Article Cloud and server

I had the honor and privilege a couple of weeks ago, to participate in a recording of The Changelog, a podcast dedicated to Open Source technology.You can listen to it here.These guys — Jerod and Adam — produce a fantastic show, and we covered a lot

Dustin Kirkland
18 June 2016