Last week I decided to try out Amazon EC2 mainly for running and testing Rails applications and so far it has been great fun!
This blog posting describes how I created an Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server edition image for use with Amazon EC2.
Download and install the EC2 command line tools
curl -O http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip
mkdir ~/.ec2
cd ~/.ec2
unzip ec2-api-tools.zip
ln -s ec2-api-tools-1.2-13740 ec2-api-tools
Set the environment variables necessary to run the tools
export EC2_HOME=~/.ec2/ec2-api-tools
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home/
Download your private key and certificate from your Amazon Web Services account to the ~/.ec2 folder.
Generate a key pair
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.ec2/pk-8WU9XGOPO65IKA7O96M2KEKVOS5288KU.pem
export EC2_CERT=~/.ec2/cert-8WU9XGOPO65IKA7O96M2KEKVOS5288KU.pem
mkdir ~/.ec2
ec2-add-keypair gsg-keypair > ~/.ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair
chmod 600 ~..ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair
Launch a Fedora Core 4: Base instance.
ec2-run-instances ami-20b65349 -k gsg-keypair
This returns an instance number like i-9536dcfc.
Try running
ec2-describe-instances i-9536dcfc
until the status returned is no longer ‘pending’ but ‘running’.
Allow ssh access and log in
ec2-authorize default -p 22
ssh -i ~/.ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair root@ec2-67-202-21-218.compute-1.amazonaws.com
On the EC2 instance run
wget http://erichsen.net/blog/fc4-base
chmod 755 fc4-base
./fc4-base
fc4-base is a script found in this forum posting. I adapted it to create an Ubuntu 6.06 image instead of 6.10.
After the script has finished execution copy the private key and certificate from the local machine to the EC2 instance
scp -i ~/.ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair ~/.ec2/pk-8WU9XGOPO65IKA7O96M2KEKVOS5288KU.pem root@ec2-67-202-21-218.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/root/
scp -i ~/.ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair ~/.ec2/cert-8WU9XGOPO65IKA7O96M2KEKVOS5288KU.pem root@ec2-67-202-21-218.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/root/
Create an image and sign it with the private key
ec2-bundle-image -i /mnt/ubuntu606base.img -k /root/pk-8WU9XGOPO65IKA7O96M2KEKVOS5288KU.pem -c cert-8WU9XGOPO65IKA7O96M2KEKVOS5288KU.pem -u '5171-9220-6573'
The image must be stored on S3 so I create a bucket (from my local Mac)
sudo gem i aws-s3 -y
export AMAZON_ACCESS_KEY_ID="1IQ8AHOAWNRDMQOI91ZK"
export AMAZON_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="VCddmbA9C4D8w/mw6aLZjzCkMoEyx5EUvouJdY/4"
s3sh
Bucket.create('erichsen.net')
On the EC2 instance I upload the image
ec2-upload-bundle -b erichsen.net -m /tmp/ubuntu606base.img.manifest.xml -a '1IQ8AHOAWNRDMQOI91ZK' -s 'VCddmbA9C4D8w/mw6aLZjzCkMoEyx5EUvouJdY/4'
From my local Mac I register the instance and that’s it!
ec2-register erichsen.net/ubuntu606base.img.manifest.xml
The ec2-register returns an AMI id – in this case ami-4acd2823. Let’s try it out
ec2-run-instances ami-4acd2823 -k gsg-keypair
ec2-describe-instances i-9536dcfc
ssh -i ~/.ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair root@ec2-67-202-24-151.compute-1.amazonaws.com
YES! I was able to ssh into an EC2 instance running my Ubuntu 6.06 image! Note that the ssh configuration of the image is not the best – it allows root logins which is not in general a good idea.
Hope this helps someone else wanting to play with Ubuntu on EC2.
