CSCI E-168

Errata

• Windows users!!: See special note regarding keypairs (Step 8) below. I have received reports that the keypair generation is awkward, flaky, or broken in ElasticFox, so I’ve provided some alternative instructions at the end of this page.
• In point 11 below, I talk about opening ports up for the “Basic” security group. I suggest that you open port 3000. This isn’t in the recording, but I’d like you to do it so that you can test a quick Rails app in development mode in the next screencast.

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In this screencast, I’ll demonstrate the initial AWS/EC2/S3 signup, and will launch a server. The followup screencasts will show how to set up a system for Ruby on Rails, serving the application with the Passenger module for Apache (http://www.modrails.com/). Deployment will be conducted with Capistrano (http://www.capify.org/index.php/Capistrano).

The reason this screencast is password-protected is because, while I have tried to hide all personal details, there may be an occasional display of my address, phone number, etc. If I did miss a display of such information, I trust you not to share it with anyone. Thanks.

Here are the steps. Skim these steps before watching the screencast (link at bottom).

1. It is not required that you deploy your final project to EC2! So if this looks too hard or uninteresting, you needn’t do it.
2. After your final project proposal has been approved, your TA will give you a credit code from Amazon that is good for $100 worth of usage. A small instance that is left running continuously for a month costs about $75. Instance usage is charged by the hour — $0.10/hour for a small instance — so gauge your usage accordingly.NOTE: Critical! If you exceed your credit code grant, you start paying real money from your credit card. We are not responsible for this, so monitor your usage. When in doubt, shut servers down! Also, we not give you an additional credit code (there aren’t any extras). Don’t ask.NOTE: The instructions here do NOT create a “production quality” server for a business, but it’s good enough for a personal project. Also, the security is merely OK. For instance, we will allow ssh connections from anywhere to make it easier to get to your server.
3. Sign up for AWS, EC2, and S3. You need to sign up for each of these, in this order.
   http://aws.amazon.com
   http://aws.amazon.com/ec2[In the screencast, I say something about signing up for S3: You don't have to do that separately anymore.]
4. Now we want to add the “credit code” from your TA. In the main AWS portal area (http://aws.amazon.com / “Your Account”), go to “Payment Method,” and add your code at the bottom.
5. Next stop: Security Credentials.Make note of:
   • Your AWS Access Key
   • Your AWS Secret Access Key
   • (I recommend copying them into a text file.)
6. Install the ElasticFox add-on (http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=609)
7. When you first run Tools/Elasticfox, you will be prompted for credentials. Enter a name for your credentials, your AWS Access Key, and your AWS Secret Access Key.
8. [Windows users! See bottom of the page for an alternative way to generate a keypair.] Click on the “Keypairs” tab. Click the green key icon to create a keypair, and then enter a name for the pair. You will now be asked to save the file somewhere: My recommendation for now is to save it to your desktop. This file contains your private key. NOTE: If you lose this file, you will not be able to log into your instance. Period. So don’t lose it! On Linux and Mac OS/X, change the permissions so no one else can read it (chmod 600 file).
9. From the “Regions” drop-down, pick us-east-1
10. Pick the “Security Groups” tab. Click the green plus. Create a group named “Basic.” Leave the radio button at the default (”Enable SSH and RDP for this Host?”) and then click “Create Group.”
11. Now select HTTP protocol from the protocol dropdown, select “Network,” and enter “0.0.0.0/0″ and click Add. Do the same for ssh. If you want to be a bit more secure, you can constrain ssh to just the “Host” radio button, and click the button for “Get My Host Address”; then ssh will only work from your current network address. Finally, also open up port 3000; for this one, you can just click the radio for “Host” and click the button for “Get My Host Address” — this means that port 3000 will only be open to your current IP address.
12. Click the “Images” tab. In the text box, enter: ami-1515f67c This is the stock AMI for Ubuntu 9.10 (see http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/karmic/release/).
13. Right click on the line for the image, and select “Launch Instance(s) of this AMI”
14. For the KeyPair drop-down, pick the one you created above; in the Security Groups section, select the Group you created.
15. Click Launch.
16. Now choose the “Instances” tab. Eventually, your instance will be in the “Running” state (you can click that little refresh button to get ElasticFox to update the state of all of your instances).
17. Now we’re going to create a terminal session to your server. Connect from the console by ssh-ing to a server with the “public DNS name.” To get this, right-click on the instance, and pick “Copy Public DNS name to clipboard.” Then go to the console, change your directory to where the private key file is, and type what’s below, pasting your public DNS name after the @ sign:

    ssh -i id-jgn-demo ubuntu@ec2-174-129-56-164.compute-1.amazonaws.com
    

    So in the case above, my private key is in the file id-jgn-demo, and the public DNS name is: ec2-174-129-56-164.compute-1.amazonaws.com, and I’m logging in as the ubuntu user.

18. Play around.
19. Log out (just press Control-D).
20. Now terminate the instance (right-click and choose “Terminate”).
21. Congratulations! You have created a running server in the Amazon cloud!

Click for screencast

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For Windows users, especially: Generating a keypair via the AWS Console

In Step 8 above, I tell you how to generate a keypair using Elasticfox. Apparently there are problems with this under Windows.

Here’s how to do the same thing with the AWS console.

1. Go to http://aws.amazon.com/console/
2. Sign in
3. Click “keypairs” (left-side navigation pane)
4. Click “Create Key Pair” (upper-left of “Key Pairs” pane)
5. Give it a name and and click “create”
6. This will initiate a download
7. The downloaded file (something like key.pem) is your private key; you use it the same way as I recommend in step 17 above, except that you will say “-i key.pem”; if you like, you can rename this file so that it doesn’t have the “.pem” file type.
8. Now if you go back to Elasticfox and select the “KeyPairs” tab, you should see a row for your new keypair. I would recommend using Elasticfox as above, though much of the functionality is available through the web-based console.

That should be it. Again, keep this private key in a safe place. If you lose it, you won’t be able to log in to instances created with that keypair.