Arope's Blog: How To Guides, Reviews, Music, Movies and All

EMC2 Etape Course (Corsa) - My entry into road cycling

2008-07-22T13:06:00.006+09:30

In the last 6 months, I've been consistently riding my bike to work almost every day. It's about 22 km ride return. It was extremely hard to start, but after about a month, I started to feel really good while riding, and at certain time I just can't wait to go outside and ride my bike.

I started will my 4 years old Apollo LSX 1.0 mountain bike, a reasonably good bike but after a while I began to think of upgrading my bike to a road bike. I have been looking for a good entry level road bike (both brand new & second hand for less AUD1000), and I'm quite surprise with the number of choices available. I've had a look at the Giant OCR 2, Avanti Sprint, Malvern Star Capo Sport, Apollo Ventoux, and a few more. But then after having a look at the EMC2 Etape Course, it's almost like love at first sight and I immediately bought one. Geoff at Glenelg Cycles has successfully convinced me to get the bike and gave a lot of good advice in riding and maintaining a road bike.

The Etape Course has a blue paint finish. I actually prefer to get a red one, but that red is only available in the next EMC2 range (Elect), which is out of my budget range. But I'm still pretty happy the way the bike looks. The bike was relatively light, and when I compare with the giant OCR2 (just by lifting with my hand), I though the EMC2 Etape is lighter. But I might be wrong. Anyway, it is still way lighter than my mountain bike.

Out of the bike shop, I immediately took the bike on a 24 km ride to my office, and I was quite impressed with the ride. Taking cars analogy, it feels like driving a sports car, while my mountain bike feels like driving a 4WD. I feel that I can accelerate a lot faster and way easier to maintain higher than 30kmph speed. Going uphills is also a lot less effortless.

It was rather uncomfortable first with the ride position, as I was mostly sitting pretty upright with my mountain bike before, while I need to bent down more to ride the EMC2. But I had the bike for about 5 days now and it started to feel a lot more comfortable. It takes me sometime as well to get used to the brakes handle and gear shifters location on the handle bar, and getting my shoes inside the clip cage on the pedal.

The bike frame is a triple butted alloy tube, which means that the center section of the tube is fairly thin while the ends of the tube is thicker where it is needed for joining strength. This makes the frame fairly light while increasing the strength as well.

The bike has 18 speed gears with Shimano Sora shifters, crankset, front derailleurs, and rear derailleurs. The wheels hub is also Shimano. There's also a chain catcher just in case the bike chain overshoots.

The bike has carbon forks which should smooth out the road vibration, but I wish is came with ca carbon seat post as well. It's not really a big issue as I can easily upgrade the seat post later.

In summary, I was quite impressed with the bike and highly recommended this bike to anyone looking for an excellent entry level road bike.

Sony Stereo Bluetooth Headset DRBT20NX Review

2008-06-07T16:56:00.014+09:30

Around the second half of 2007, I was actively searching for a good stereo bluetooth headset. There wasn't that many available at that time, and most of them were pretty huge, bulky and simply not stylish enough to use casually everyday (such as the Nokia BH-501).

The first one that I found was attractive enough was the Sony Ericsson HBH-DS970, which I bought one from an Ebay store in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a fake unit with really crappy sound, inconsistent connectivity and bad packaging. That gave me a lesson not to buy anything from Hong Kong or China anymore through Ebay.

Then sometime in October 2007, I came across the Sony DRBT20NX headset. It looks pretty good, stylish and simple enough. I manage to buy one from Ebay in Australia for about AUD50 (which was a really good deal considering the retail price in Australia is AUD199). There're some good things and bad things about the headset which I thought worth to write about.

Sound Quality

As I'm planning to use the bluetooth headset mainly to listen music from my mobile phone, hence sound quality is very important. I have tested the headset using both Nokia N95 and Sony Ericsson M600i mobile phones.

Well, the sound quality was really exceptional for me, almost as good as listening through a wired connection. I was really impressed with both the base sound quality and the treble sound clarity. Comparing between the Nokia N95 and Sony Ericsson M600i mobile phones, I found out that the N95 produced slightly better clarity than the Sony Ericsson M660i. The M600i does produced better base sound (with MegaBass on), but it lacks the treble sound clarity.

Overall, I was really satisfied with the sound quality on both phones that I bought another one from Yes Asia for around US79 for my fiance.

Connectivity

The connection process was fairly simple, and once the headset is registered in the phone's trusted bluetooth devices list, it automatically connect the phones after switching on.

Overall, the connectivity was quite stable on both Nokia N95 and Sony Ericsson M600i, with minimum connectivity lost. However, I would say that the connection on M600i was slightly better than the N95 as I get more sudden connection lost with the N95.

Ease of use and Comforts

The headset is very comfortable to use, the in-ear phones fits nicely in my ear and the rubber gloves came in three sizes. The outside sound and noise is also isolated pretty well.

Basic music controls (volume, play/pause, skip) is provided by the unit. Answering and making phone calls is done through one button operation. To answer a phone call, I just need to press the multi function button, and to make a call to the last dialled number or voice dial, that can also be done using the multi function button. All the controls button is pretty much easily accessible in whatever activity you're doing. I'm mostly using the unit while cycling, and it is very easy for me to control the music and making phone calls even while cycling.

Battery Life

I was quite impressed as well with the battery life. On the specification sheet, the running battery life was rated 11 hours and the standby battery life is 100 hours. So far, I've never run out of battery while using it and I only charged the unit every 2 or 3 days.

Reliability

This is the one thing that I'm not satisfied with. One of the headsets was broken (one ear phone stopped working) sometime in February 2008 after five months of use. I found the the connection of the neck strap to the main unit (as shown below) was not strong enough and gets stretched easily, which may brake the cable connection.

I brought the unit to a Sony service center and within about one week, they have replaced the unit with a new ones. However, after about 3 months, the unit broke again and this time unfortunately, both of the headset that I have came down with the same problem.

I have sent both units to a service center and currently waiting for their respond. The units came with one year warranty, and with this kind of reliability, I expect I won't be able to use them anymore once I run out of warranty.

Conclusion

Everything was ging quite well for the headset except for its built quality and realiabilty. I just hope that Sony will address this issue soon. Feel free to give your comments, especially if you have use one as well.

A Good Walk in Morialta Park (PART 2)

2008-06-06T11:56:00.009+09:30

This is the second part of the story. If you miss the first part, see it here.

12.40 PM

We've just get our stomach filled, and energy restored, Time to continue our walk towards Deep View lookout.

12.44 PM

We reached Deep View lookout. Below is the Giant Cave as viewed from the lookout.

And... the Adelaide surroundings....
And the valley...

And a good view of Adelaide city...

12.50 PM

We're on the way down now, hurts our leg a little bit walking down. I think going up is probably easier.

12.58 PM

We reached the hill's foot and continue walking towards the bottom of the first falls.

1.08 PM

We reached the first falls, and here's a snapshot of it. There's a rainbow as well across the bottom of the falls.

1.16 PM

We began our walk back to the car. On the way home, we stopped at The Parade's Baskin Robbins and have a good cool nice ice creams.

A Good Walk in Morialta Park (PART 1)

2008-06-06T08:49:00.030+09:30

It was a beautiful second winter day in Adelaide last Sunday. Too good to be wasted just staying at home. Sun Young and I decided to went out hiking in Morialta Conservation Park, the closest best conservation park close to Adelaide city. We haven't been there for a while now, and this time we're going to tackle the longest route, which the yellow line on the map below (a good 7.3 km walk). Go to here if you would like to see detail brochure and map of the area.

Prior to leaving home, we prepared enough water and kimbab (sushi for Korean) for our lunch up there in the park.

10:08 AM

Reached the carpark area. A few cars around but not too busy yet.

10:22 AM

We reached the foot of the hills, began ascending as the track gets steeper.

10:25 AM

Got a little bit higher, and manage to take a tiny snapshot of the see and some surrounding Adelaide suburb.

10:26 AM

850 m steep walk to go to the first fall.

10:33 AM

We reached the Kookaburra lookout. Here's a snapshot of the valley.

10:41 AM

We've went a little bit off way from Kookaburra lookout, not following the yellow trail. But manage to get a better photos of the surrounding areas.

11:05 AM

We reached the top of the first fall. It's not really a big fall, but it's good and soothing to hear the flowing water sound.

11:09 AM

We can see the second falls now. Nice and beautiful.

11:11 AM

Came across this Australian native plant.

11.15 AM

We're following the creek to go to the third falls. The trail was getting wet and cooler as we're deep in the valley away from direct sunlight.

11:19 AM

390 m to go to the third falls.

11:22 AM

One more plant snapshot.

11:26 AM

Reached the third falls.

11.35 AM

We continued following the yellow trail, and come across beautiful rock formations (idea for those who enjoys rock climbing).

11.39 AM

3.3 km to the carpark area.

11.41 AM

Came across some people doing rock climbing. A bit small to see but there's a guy in red t-shirt climbing the rocks.

11.46 AM

Some more photos of the surrounding area.

11.50 AM

We went offtrack for a while, and went up a steep and slippery trail go a little bit higher. Need to be slow and careful.

12.30 PM

We stopped for a while for lunch. Just a short one.

To continue with the next part, see it here.

Don't forget to clear dowload history

2008-06-06T08:37:00.003+09:30

If you're going to film something on your computer screen, remember to clear your dowload history. Avoid embarassment. Look closely on his download history.

Furniture Romance

2008-06-06T08:25:00.002+09:30

I haven't update this blog for a while now. So, to cheer things up, I thought a joke will be nice. Here we go.....

Howard was a furniture dealer from Georgia. He wanted a new line of furniture to spark up his inventory. He had never traveled out of the country, so he thought he would go to Paris to see what the furniture market was like over there.

He arrived in Paris and toured several furniture galleries and manufacturing facilities. He found a new line of furniture that he thought would go over well back home in Georgia. He closed the deal for the first shipment and was very pleased with the results. Howard decided he would stop by a little bistro to reward himself for his new business deal. He stops by for a drink and the little bistro is quite crowded. Actually he gets the last available table.

After awhile a tall, beautiful French girl comes in looking for a table. The only remaining seat is at Howards table. She says something to him in French, but he doesn't understand. He signals for her to have a seat. She joins him. But their attempts at conversation don't get very far because she doesn't speak any English and he doesn't speak French.

At one point Howard takes a napkin an draws a wine glass on it. The woman nods and Howard buys her a glass of wine. A little later Howard draws some food, she nods. So they leave the bistro and go to a romantic cafe for dinner.

Howard draws two people dancing and some musical notes. she nods happily, and they go dancing and are having a wonderful time.

As the evening wears on, the girl takes a napkin and draws a four-poster bed. And to this day, Howard hasn't figured out how she knew he was in the furniture business.

How to Setup 2 Webserver with MySQL cluster and 1 Load Balancer on Amazon EC2

2008-05-27T15:58:00.028+09:30

This time I'm going to show you how to setup 2 webservers with MySQL cluster and 1 Load Balancer using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, as shown in the above diagram. If the diagram text is too small that you can't read it, click on the diagram and you can see the bigger version.

Now, I assume that you have gone through my previous 2 guides:

as we are going to use the LAMP server instance that we have created in the Setting up a LAMP server guide. If you haven't, you need to be familiar with running and saving Amazon EC2 instances, and also have a LAMP server AMI ready to be used and run. A LAMP server means that you need to have at least a Linux instance with Apache webserver, MySQL database client & server, and PHP installed.

Run 3 LAMP instances

First of all, launch 3 instances of the LAMP AMI. We're going to assign each of this instances as one of the following servers.

Management Instance

Public DNS: ec2-67-202-62-113.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Public IP: 67.202.63.113
Private DNS: ip-10-251-235-15.ec2.internal
Private DNS: 10.251.235.14

LAMP Instance 1

Public DNS: ec2-75-101-246-9.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Public IP: 75.101.246.9
Private DNS: ip-10-251-182-160.ec2.internal
Private IP: 10.251.182.160

LAMP Instance 2

Public DNS: ec2-72-44-39-69.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Public IP: 72.44.39.69
Private DNS: ip-10-251-143-191.ec2.internal
Private IP: 10.251.143.191

Record your instances DNS and IP addresses details, and change the public DNS and private DNS on the above diagrams to match you instances. You can easily get a string copy of the DNSs using ElasticFox

Configure MySQL Management Instance

SSH and connect to the Management Instance. We don't need Apache Web Server and mySQL server running on our Management Instance. Hence, we're going to uninstall Apache and stop mySQL server from running.

Let's stop Apache and mySQL from running first.

/etc/init.d/apache2 stop
/etc/init.d/mysql stop

I also would like to make sure that mySQL will not be run on startup. To do this I'm using an application called sysv-rc-conf. Install this using the following command.

apt-get install sysv-rc-conf

Once it's installed run

sysv-rc-conf

and remove all the MySQL startup component.

To uninstall Apache, enter the following command.

apt-get remove apache2

I know that this way is not very efficient, but since we're continuing from the previous guide, I just want to use the AMI that we've created before. Optionally, you can start from a clean base Linux AMI, and just install the mySQL management application.

Create the mySQL cluster management directory (if it doesn't exist yet).

mkdir /var/lib/mysql-cluster

Then, go to the directory and setup the config.ini file.

cd /var/lib/mysql-cluster emacs config.ini

Note that I'm using emacs as the text editor here. But feel free to use any text editor you like.

Next, insert the following text and change the DNS addresses corresponding to your instances private DNS addresses. You can put either the DNS name as below or in the xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx format (Whichever you prefer).

[NDBD DEFAULT]
NoOfReplicas=2
[MYSQLD DEFAULT]
[NDB_MGMD DEFAULT]
[TCP DEFAULT]
# Managment Server
[NDB_MGMD]
HostName=ip-10-251-235-15.ec2.internal # the IP/DNS of THIS SERVER
# Storage Engines
[NDBD]
HostName=ip-10-251-182-160.ec2.internal # the IP/DNS of the FIRST SERVER
DataDir= /var/lib/mysql-cluster
[NDBD]
HostName=ip-10-251-143-191.ec2.internal # the IP/DNS of the SECOND SERVER
DataDir=/var/lib/mysql-cluster
# 2 MySQL Clients
# I personally leave this blank to allow rapid changes of the mysql clients;
# you can enter the hostnames of the above two servers here. I suggest you dont.
[MYSQLD]
[MYSQLD]

Next, start the management server. ndb_mgmd That's all for the MySQL management server. You can keep this application running (it uses very small amount of memory and CPU power), or shut it down if you like.

Configure MySQL Servers

We need to perform this section on both LAMP Instances 1 and LAMP instance 2.

First, SSH to the instance and stop any running mySQL server

/etc/init.d/mysql stop

Next, we need to modify the /etc/my.cnf file.

emacs /etc/mysql/my.cnf

Add the the following lines in the appropriate section of the file. Make sure to change the DNS/IP addresses to your Management Instance address.

[mysqld]
ndbcluster
ndb-connectstring=ip-10-251-235-15.ec2.internal # the IP/DNS of the MANAGEMENT INSTANCE SERVER
[mysql_cluster]
ndb-connectstring=ip-10-251-235-15.ec2.internal # the IP/DNS of the MANAGEMENT INSTANCE SERVER

Create the data directory /var/lib/mysql-cluster (if it's not already exist) .

mkdir /var/lib/mysql-cluster

Then start the storage engine and start mySQL server.

ndbd
/etc/init.d/mysql start

Now we need to repeat the same procedure on the second instance (LAMP Instance 2).

Testing MySQL cluster configuration

Once you have completed the setup on both LAMP instances, it's time to test the cluster configuration.

In the Management Server, enter the management console with this command.

/usr/local/mysql/bin/ndb_mgm

Then enter the

show

command to see the connection status of the MySQL cluster, as shown below.

Now you can test the configuration on the MySQL servers on both LAMP instances.

Enter MySQL console on either LAMP Instance 1 or LAMP Instance 2 and enter the following commands (assuming you have setup a root password form mysql console).

mysql -u root -p
use test;

Note: If database test doesn't exist in your mysql, enter create database test to create the database.

CREATE TABLE mytest (i INT) ENGINE=NDBCLUSTER;
INSERT INTO mytest () VALUES (10);
SELECT * FROM mytest;

Now, go to the the other LAMP instance, and run the following commands.

mysql -u root -p
use test;
SELECT * FROM mytest;

If the cluster configuration is working properly, you should get the same output of the SELECT command.

If it's working for you, CONGRATULATIONS!!!!

Setting Up HAProxy on Management Instance

SSH to the management instance, and install HAProxy.

apt-get install haproxy

We need to modify the configuration file. But before that is better to backup the original file.

cp /etc/haproxy.cfg /etc/haproxy.cfg.orig
cat /dev/null > /etc/haproxy.cfg
emacs /etc/haproxy.cfg

Now, add the following into the configuration file. Don't forget to change the webserver IP/DNS addresses to your instances addresses.

global
log 127.0.0.1 local0
log 127.0.0.1 local1 notice
#log loghost local0 info
maxconn 4096
#debug
#quiet
user haproxy
group haproxy

defaults
log global
mode http
option httplog
option dontlognull
retries 3
redispatch
maxconn 2000
contimeout 5000
clitimeout 50000
srvtimeout 50000

listen webfarm *:80 #HAPROXY listens to ALL IP's Port 80
mode http
stats enable
stats auth someuser:somepassword
balance roundrobin
cookie JSESSIONID prefix
#cookie SERVERID insert indirect
option httpclose
option forwardfor
server webA ip-10-251-143-191.ec2.internal:80 cookie A check #LAMP server instance 1 IP/DNS
server webB ip-10-251-182-160.ec2.internal:80 cookie B check #LAMP server instance 2 IP/DNS

Save and close the file once you're done.

Next, we need to set ENABLED to 1 in /etc/default/haproxy

# Set ENABLED to 1 if you want the init script to start haproxy.
ENABLED=1
# Add extra flags here.
#EXTRAOPTS="-de -m 16"

We can start HAProxy on the Management Instance using the following command/

etc/init.d/haproxy start

You can now test the load balancer by opening the Management Instance public DNS on your web browser. In my example, its http://ec2-67-202-62-113.compute-1.amazonaws.com

You might want to put make 2 different index.html file for the web servers to test that the load balancer does send your http request in round robin method to the web servers.

Fox example, in LAMP Instance 1 you can add the following test in /var/www/index.html

You have been directed to LAMP Instance 1

While the following can be added to the /var/www/index.html in LAMP Instance 2.

You have been directed to LAMP Instance 2

Have a go at testing it. Let me know if it doesn't work or you found any errors in my guide.

That's all for now folks. I'm still playing around to get high availability working in Amazon EC2 (that is having a standby load balancer, in case of fault on Management Instance). If anyone have any tips on doing this, I would appreciate if you can share it with me.

Latest MC Mong Music

2008-05-27T10:49:00.001+09:30

Here's a catchy and fun song from MC Mong, one of my favorite Korean artist.

Enjoy!!!!

A Beautiful Music

2008-05-27T10:43:00.002+09:30

It's a beautiful morning again here in Adelaide as I rode my bike to work. I was listening to the Porco Rosso OST by Joe Hisaishi on the bike, and then did some YouTube search on his live show. Hence, I found this video which shows nice music from the movie Howl's Moving Castle.

Configure LAMP server on Amazon EC2 (Linux Apache mySQL PHP)

2008-05-26T17:56:00.014+09:30

In this guide, we're going to set up a Ubuntu based LAMP server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). If you are a starter with Amazon EC2, do have a look in my get started guide first before going through with this. You need to first setup an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account and learn how to run and save an instance using ElasticFox and puTTY.

I'm going to use one of the base install Ubunty Hardy AMI created by alestic as the Linux foundation. Start up ElasticFox and in the available Machine Images (AMIs) list, select the base Ubuntu Hardy AMI with ID ami-6a57b203 (alestic/ubuntu-8.04-hardy-base-20080517.manifest.xml), and select Launch Instance(s) of this AMI.
Make sure that you've created a keypair for SSH authentication. If not, have look at the get start guide here. Select the appropriate keypair in the next window, and launch the instance. It may take a few minutes for the instance to run (keep refreshing the Your Instances section).

Once the instance state changed to running, SSH to the instance's public DNS as shown below using puTTY.

You should see something like the window below.

On your instance's command shell, enter the following command to begin installation of the LAMP server, and follow through the on screen instructions.

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

Once that is completed, let's enable mod rewrite to support pretty URL.

a2enmod rewrite

Let's first update the apt-get application

apt-get update

Install phpmyadmin with the following command.

apt-get install phpmyadmin

You need at least one text editor application. My favorite one in Linux is emacs. Use the following command to install emacs.

apt-get install emacs22

To setup phpmyadmin under apache all you need to do is include the following line in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf

If you use emacs to edit the file, use the command below to open the file in the text editor

emacs /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Make the necessary changed in emacs, the use Ctrl X-S to save the file, and then Ctrl X-C to close.

This is optional, but I use php curl library in some of my work. So I would like to install the library using the following command

apt-get install php5-curl

Now, we can restart apache.

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Let's try out our newly installed webserver and phpmyadmin. Get your instance public DNS, and append phpmyadmin at the end. Open the address in your web browser. For example

http://ec2-67-202-12-202.compute-1.amazonaws.com/phpmyadmin

Congratulations!!! Your LAMP installations is working if you can see the welcome page of phpmyamin. You can use phpmyadmin to manage your mySQL database (add users, create databases etc). Just remeber your mySQL root password that you specified during the installation.

Lastly, you need to save your LAMP instance and create your own machine image (AMI). Refer to the getting started guide if you don't know how to do this.

If you would like to go further by configuring a LAMP cluster with load balancer, have a look at my cluster with load balancer guide here.

Happiness???

2008-05-26T09:41:00.003+09:30

Today is quite a beautiful day here in Adelaide, and I'm feeling pretty good too. I thought it's a good time to share some of my thought about happiness. Although I'm not very sure if the best time to talk about happiness is when I'm feeling happy or vice versa.

So, how do I make myself happy? I would say that I tried to be satisfied with what I have and not to worry myself too much of the things that I don't have. I know that it sound very common, but I think that's the way that work best for me.

But how can I make myself feel satisfied? It's easy to say to make yourself feel satisfied, but how? There's so many things around us that make us feel envious towards others.

I don't know the answer clearly myself. I always feel good whenever I've achieved something, no matter how small they may looks like. By the end of every work day, I think more of what I've achieved that day than what I need to do more in the next day. But this kind of thinking may also sounds that I'm not very ambitious. Maybe I'm not an ambitious person after all.

That's probably why we need to have a good balance between satisfaction and ambition. Too much or too less of each maybe bad for our life.

How do strike this balance between satisfaction and ambition?

I admit that I am not balanced as well, as I think I have more satisfaction than ambition in my mind. My ambition doesn't go far and mostly I'm looking forward just for the next day or next week. Not as far as next months or next years. But I do feel happy must of the time just thinking like that.

Well, that's all I have time to write for half hour this morning. Let me know your opinion as well.

Quick Start Guide with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) on Windows

2008-05-25T13:59:00.015+09:30

I have been introduced to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) about 2 weeks ago, and I was quite impressed with it. What Amazon provide with EC2 is a virtually unlimited amount of virtual machines/servers for you to run any Linux based OS and install whatever application that you like in the virtual machine. Each virtual machine unit is called instances, and instances are saved as Amazon Machine Images (AMI).

I though it will be useful for the online community for me to put up a quick start guide to Amazon EC2. Let me know of any erros or problem that you encounter. Cheers...

AWS Account Setup

First, you need to go to Amazon Web Services site to create an AWS account and sign up to both the Amazon EC2 and S3 services.

Once you have completed the signing up process, you need to get your AWS access identifiers. Move your mouse over the Your Web Services Account button and select the View Access Key Identifiers as shown below.

Record both Your Access Key ID and Your Secret Access Key as shown below. Put these information somewhere safe where only you or an authorised person can access them. For example:

Your Access Key ID: 2B8WQAKHBMR2YBECYGGQ
Your Secret Access Key: K65RrZP8yrqz+PxCLNI+feDkaOiWFy93+df+63lCF

At the bottom of the thsi key identifiers page there is theYour X.509 Certificate section. Click the Create New button to create a new X.509 certificate . Then, download the certificated and put it in a safe directory. In my case, it's in C:\ec2-keys directory.

You should end up with a PEM-encoded X509 certificate and a private key file named as per the examples below:

cert-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem
pk-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem

You also need your AWS account ID. Move your mouse over the and select Your Web Services Account and select Account Activity. At the top of this page, just under the Account Activity title, you should see a label named "Account Number", followed by a hyphenated number (something like 4952-1993-3132). Record this number and put it in a safe location.

SSH Client Setup (puTTY)

Next, you need to install an SSH client. Create a directory called putty in C:\Programs Files. Download the these PuTTY applications: PuTTY client, PuTTYgen and PSCP, and save them in the C:\Program Files\putty directory.

Also add PuTTY directory in the Windows Path variable. To do this, open the System Properties window, then select the Advanced tab as shown below.

Then in the System variables section, click on the Environment Variables button to open the window as shown below.

Scroll down to find Variable named Path and select it. Click Edit, and add the PuTTY directory at the end of the current Path value as shown below. Click OK and close the System Properties windows.

ElasticFox Setup

I'm using the ElasticFox Firefox plugin to manage my Amazon EC2 instances. Download and install ElasticFox from here, then restart Firefox.

Run the ElasticFox plugin. You should get a screen that looks like below.

Click on Credentials located on the top left corner of the ElasticFox interface. We need to put in our AWS identifiers. Enter any Account Name that you like, and then your AWS Access Key and AWS Secret Access Key. Click Add to save your details, and close the window.

Now, click on Account IDs and enter your account ID (the 12 digit number without the hyphens) and any Display Name you like. So, if your ID is 4952-1993-3132, the you should enter 495219933132. Click Add and close the window.

Next, we need to create an SSH key pair to be used when we perform SSH remote login to an AWS instance. In ElasticFox, select the Keypairs tab. Then click on the green Create a New Keypair button. Enter any keypair name you like and click OK. You'll be prompted to save the generated keypair. Give a name (*.pem file extension), and save the keypair to a location (in my case its C:\ec2-keys\foc2-keypair.pem). The newly created keypair name will appear on the screen as below.

The newly generated keypair need to be changed to a format that can be understand by puTTY. We will use puTTYgen to do this. Run puTTYgen (remember where you saved it before! In my case its C:\Program File\putty\puTTYgen.exe). Then load the key that you saved before. You will be informed when the keypair has been successfully loaded.

Click on the Save private key button to save the puTTY compatible key (*.ppk file extension). Choose Yes when it the puTTYgen warning appear. In my case, I saved it to the C:\ec2-keys\foc2-keypair.ppk. Close puTTYgen once the file has been saved.

Now, we need to tell ElasticFox where to find the key. Back to ElasticFox, click on Tools and change the SSH Key Template match the location where you saved the keypair file.

Next, we need to setup the permission for external access to our amazon instance. At this stage, I'm only going to open permission for port 80 (http server) nas port 22 (SSH client). On ElasticFox, select the Security Group tab.

In the Group Permissions section, click the green Tick button to grant a new permission. The following window should appear, and enter the first port which is port 80 as below.

Click add, and repeat the same procedure for port 22. The newly created permission should appear on the permission list once created.

Now that you've finished with the setup, we are going to try to run an instance.

Running an Instance

In ElasticFox, select the AMIs and Instances tab. In the Machine Images (AMIs) section, click on the blue Refresh button to list all the available public AMIs. The window should appear like below.

In this example, we're going to run a base install of Linux Ubuntu Hardy created by the excellent Alestic people. As shown below, enter hardy in the test box in the Machine Images (AMIs) section. This will list down all the available Ubuntu Hardy AMIs.
Select the latest Ubuntu Hardy AMI, in this example I am selecting AMI ID ami-6a57b203 (alestic/ubuntu-8.04-hardy-base-20080517.manifest.xml). Right click on the AMI, and select Launch instance(s) of this AMI. The following window will appear. Select your keypair in and click on Launch.

The launched instance will appear in the Your Instances section. Wait until the instance status changed to running. Keep refreshing the window (click the blue refresh button ) to update the status.

Once you instance is running, right click over your instance and select SSH to Public DNS Name. This is to connect to your instance via SSH using puTTY. If everything was setup properly, you should get the following screen.

CONGRATULATIONS!!! You have successfully run an instance and remote login to it via SSH. You're now free to do whatever you like to the instance. Just consider it as your own Linux PC that you can install any applications (Apache web server, MySQL etc).

If you need to create a webserver with PHP & mySQL (LAMP server) with an amazon instance, have a look at my LAMP server guide here.

And if you would like to set up a web server and mySQL cluster in Amazon EC2, have a look at my cluster guide here.

Savings Your Instance

First, we need to copy the PEM certificate and key files to the running instance. We will use PSCP to do this. Make sure that you know the location and the names of your

keypair file (eg. C:\ec2-keys\foc2-keypair.ppk)
AWS certificate file (eg. C:\ec2-keys\cert-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem)
AWS private key file (eg. C:\ec2-keys\pk-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem)

Also, get the Public DNS from ElasticFox in the Your Instances section. Also, you can copy the Public DNS by right clicking your running instance.

In my example, the Public DNS is ec2-67-202-32-74.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Open the windows command prompt (Start->Run->Open: "cmd"). Then enter the following commands:

pscp -i <your keypair file> <your aws certificate file> <your aws private key file > root@<your public dns>:/mnt

In my example the command will be

pscp -i C:\ec2-keys\foc2-keypair.ppk C:\ec2-keys\cert-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem C:\ec2-keys\pk-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem root@ec2-67-202-32-74.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/mnt

Note that I'm copying the files to the /mnt directory in the running instance.

Now connect again to the running instance using PuTTY and go to the /mnt directory. Both the certificate and private key file should be there.

Now, we need to create the currently running instance image. Enter the following command on the PuTTY client

ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt -c <your aws certificate file> -k <your aws private key file> -u <your aws account number> -r i386 -p <your image name>

For example,

ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt -c cert-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem -k pk-HKZYKTAIG2ECMXYIBH3HXV4ZBZQ55CLO.pem -u 495219933132 -r i386 -p my_hardy

It should now start creating the image as shown below. This may take a few minutes.

Once the image has been created, we are going to copy the images to Amazon S3 storage facilities. The command to do that is as below.

ec2-upload-bundle -b <s3 bucket name> -m /mnt/<your image name>.manifest.xml -a <access key id> -s <secret access key>

For example,

ec2-upload-bundle -b arope_ami -m /mnt/my_hardy.manifest.xml -a 2B8WQAKHBMR2YBECYGGQ -s K65RrZP8yrqz+PxCLNI+feDkaOiWFy93+df+63lCF

If you have an Access Denied error, it's possible that the bucket name that you enter is already exist. Try different bucket name.

Once the images has been copied successfully, we are going to use ElasticFox to register the AMI. To do this, in the Machine Images (AMIs) click on the green + button, a small window will prompt you to enter the AMI manifest path. The path entered should be in the following format: <s3 bucket name>/<your image name>.manifest.xml

Your new AMI should appear in the list now and you can run as many of these AMI instances as you like.

That's all, let me know for any errors and I'll put up some more guides as well. Watch this space.