Amazon Web Services

I created this article in 2011, it was copied across to the wordpress wiki in the summer of 2013, and then amended in November 2013. I returned to it in Feb 2015, to document my adventures with wordpress. In 2017, I wanted to return to VNC/RDP and so came back to this page and I reviewed the content and moved much of it to the comments section of this page.
Virtual Private Clouds
In 2017, Amazon are keen that you use what they call a VPC, a Virtual Private Cloud, this needs a gateway (firewall) if you need it to connect to the internet. Documentation on the use and construction of the VPC is held here. Use the VPC portal to
- Create the VPC, it needs a ip block, I am usually using 10.0.0.0/16, I don’t need it to be so large.
- Create an internet gateway (IG)
- Amend the routing table, using the routing table menu item on the VPC portal, in the VPC to associate the outgoing route to the internet with the IG.
XRDP
I used neutrino labs xdrp code
- http://c-nergy.be/blog/?p=10513
- http://c-nergy.be/blog/?p=10752
Not quite working, its trying to display on the private ip address and it finds :0 cannot be written to.
I gave up on this route.
I found this support page, on the amazon site detailing how to make and connect to a bespoke desktop. I have placed the code in my ubuntu-tools github repo, called mk-rdesktop
.
I still need to either set a password, or create a new login user.
AWS also offer Desktop AMIs.
Launching an Instance
Amazon have a good page, Getting Started Guide. This focuses on Launching an Instance. Launching your 1st instance allows you to obtain an ssh key and declare some firewall rules. Make sure that ssh is enabled and that you store the key. The user and instance name are available from the aws console.
Saving to persistent storage
Amazon have a documentation page, Where to go from here? which recommended using ES storage for hosting machine images.
Console Access
I use putty or bash ssh, even easier with Ubuntu for Windows 10.
Important Amazon Support
Essential Services
- SSH – don’t forget to allow it in the firewall rules
- DNS – I use DynDNS, whose home page.
- apache – need to test that dyndns is working
- git – planet venus now uses git, see also my planet planet page
- scp/ftp – I need a file transfer program to up load stuff, it seems I have one
- one drive – see this on ask unbuntu.
While not essential the following are useful,
- Zabbix can be useful, but I have never bothered to install it since I have not been running servers. Zabbix needs firewall ports to be opened.
- Java, when the article was originally written, Linux didn’t come with Java, but most repos now support it.
- I experimented with VNC and moved my notes to the comments (17th June 2017)
Links
I originally used Second Brain to manage my AWS links, but they gave up, I transferred to del.icio.us and they gave up, and so normally use diigo today.
ooOOOoo
Comments ( 19 )
, and some aspects of my Cobalt Installation might be on the Dell or even elsewhere on this site. I use ddclient to maintain the server's dns name. My notes have been transferred to my ddclient page on this site. They include the magic runes needed to obtain the public IP address, which are documented there and on the internet at Amazon EC2 - What You May Not Have Known a blog article at codesta.com. Ubuntu users installing from the tarball will need to install the PERL SSL libraries. My ddclient wiki page was updated in November 2013 when I created a new AMI. The ubuntu install package has superb post install script. I looked for the runes again, and found these articles at stackoverflow.com.Running a remote desktop using VNC
I started my build from http://cloud.ubuntu.com/ami/, for various reasons I( used a 32 bit image, based on Natty hosted in the EU. This is a server. I then referred to