Installing a web server on an Amazon AWS free VM

In the previous post I described how you get a free linux VM in the Amazon AWS cloud up and running. This post will describe how you can use it for something practical.

Apt-get is not installed on this Micro Instance VM. So at first I tried to do a manual install of Apache by simply uploading the .tar.gz files to the VM via WinSCP and tried to run the .configure file. This didn't work as a C compiler was not installed on the system. I went on to look for GCC and got that installed and then I could install Apache. For some reason it didn't quite work, though. And also it's mayby a little too much work to get a web server up and running...

Then I stumbled upon the Yum command which is similar to Apt-get and which is actually pre-installed in the VM and is working out of the box.

With Yum, installation is a breeze. Issue the following commands:

#sudo yum install httpd
#sudo chkconfig httpd on
#sudo /etc/init.d/httpd start

The sudo command will not prompt you for a password but will let you execute commands as root. You can't su -root... (alternatively, you can try sudo -i to get a root shell)

If it complains about a missing C compiler, then install it this way:

#sudo yum install gcc

The web server installs its .conf file in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. There's is the usual test page displayed until you place an index.html file in the /var/www/html folder.

Free linux cloud VM with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Recently, Amazon announced that you can get a free linux VM for one year in their public cloud solution - Amazon Web Services (AWS). They call it a Micro Instance and it's got something like 1 vCPU, 600 MB of memory, and 10 GB storage, see specs here. You get full access to the VM via SSH but there's no console access as such.

So I decided to give it a try.

First, you need to create an AWS account (there's a link on the front page..). They need a valid creditcard for that. Then you log into the AWS Management Console. This requires you to register again. They had implemented a rather odd security feature where they call your mobile phone and you have to punch in a pin-number to confirm. I must admit that, for testing purposes, this wasn't the most smooth registration process.

Once into the AWS Management Console you're presented with a number of tabs. The first one is Amazon S3 which is an online file placeholder (i guess like an FTP server). To create your VM, go to the Amazon EC2 tab and click on Launch Instance (see below). This process is fairly simple. It is not quite easy, though, to see exactly which one is the free edition, but I just chose the minimum specs available to be on the safe side. And look for something like linux and Micro Instance.

Firewall rules are easy to configure via the web interface. You can add some pre-defined ports such as mail, web, etc. Port 22 is enabled by default.

A KPI keyset is generated (for authentication purposes) and you can download the .pem file to your local harddrive. They give an example of howto login via ssh from a console and use the generated key. Example:

ssh -i keyname.pem root@vmname.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com

If you use this command will receive a login error as root cannot login directly. So just change 'root' in front of the @ with the, in the error message, suggested 'ec2-user'.

Once logged in you can execute commands as root with the 'sudo' command. It will not prompt for a password. Or alternatively use sudo -i to get a root console. But you can't su - root.

If you want to use Putty to acces the VM directly, then you have to convert the .pem file to a .ppk file. This is easily done using this guide.

To use the .ppk file, open Putty and go to SSH -> Auth and browse to the directory where you stored the file. And then you connect to the VM (saving the profile will save you some time at next login..). There's no password.

The same .ppk file can also be used for WinSCP which is handy for uploading files directly to the VM.

As you have a public DNS name, this can be used to create an eiasier to remember C-name DNS that you can point to the generated machine name.

So far so good. Now there's access via SSH. Then I tried to configure a simple web server. I'll describe that in the next post.

vMotion between firewalls

Currently, I'm setting up a new VMware cluster as the exsiting hardware needs to be retired. The new cluster is in another management zone (and in another vCenter). To minimise downtime I looked at doing vMotion between the two clusters.

What I did was to disconnect one host from vCenter. Then add the host to the other vCenter directly on the ip number. The host was not added to the newly created cluster, only to the datacenter. And then drag and drop VMs between the clusters (EVC was enabled).

There was a couple of things that had to be tweaked before it worked.

vMotion had to be done between firewalls. When doing this, there are two important things to remember:

1. Set the default gatway of the vMotion interface (via vSphere Client)

2. Open inbound/outbound on port 8000 TCP in the firewall (see ESX configuration guide, page 150).

Furthermore, I encountered another issue. A number of VMs had a vmxnet NIC (it's some old VMs...). When starting to vMotion there was a warning that vmxnet is not supported on target host which is ESX 4 (source was ESX 3.5). However, after vMotion, the vmxnet NIC still worked. I tried to update VMware Tools and virtual hardware version to v7 and that also worked. vmxnet is kept as NIC after upgrade.