So this weekend I’ve been setting up an Amazon EC2 instance for a project I’m working on (more on that specifically soon…). I referenced Chris Whyley’s blog to start off, and here’s a few things I learned:
- Elastifox for Firefox is a lifesaver. You should use it if you’re creating instances. Use this tutorial to get started by Tim Heuer, or my new tutorial using the AWS console.
- You can use Amazon EBS snapshots to install further Windows functionality. The instance is as bare bones as possible remember, so when you need to install IIS for example you need the Windows disc. An EBS snapshot of the disc is your lifeline here. This blog item should fill in the rest. Oh also – watch out to make your EBS snapshot on the same availability zone as your instance.
- We want to run a WAMP stack, so I went ahead and installed the latest Apache, MySQL and PHP versions. When testing our web application I experienced very strange results – even after checking config files and re-checking. The answer – uninstall and install WAMP Server . Once complete, everything was fine…
- We needed FTP, so I went ahead and installed IIS and the FTP component as per item (2) above. Couple of things on this – make sure you open port 21 in your Security Group, and secondly, if you find your FTP accounts extremely slow to login and retrieve listings or upload – turn off Passive Mode in your FTP client. FTP on Windows doesn’t work great with it.
That’s it for now, will keep you posted on further things we’re looking at. Need to move the MySQL data onto a mounted EBS snapshot so that if the instance dies, our data is safe. Then I need to get the snapshot backed up onto S3 too… we’re getting close…
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