The new web-based AWS Management Console is a fantastic tool for managing your EC2 instances, images, EBS volumes and more. Amazon did a super job on this. I have to keep reminding myself that Amazon is a book store.

Just signed up for the beta of Ubuntu Server Edition for EC2 being released by Canonical. The servers I wrote about deploying recently were Ubuntu servers built using the images from Alestic.com. Bighugelabs.com is running on Ubuntu Server Edition as well (on a physical server). It’ll be nice to get “official” images directly from the [...]

Last week I completed the move of a web site hosted on a physical server to Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform. The experience was educational to say the least and so far I’m pretty happy with things. I’ll post a follow-up after I’ve had a few more weeks of experience with it. In the meantime, [...]

Damn. Gmail won’t give me my contact data at the moment. I need to ship a Christmas gift and I can’t get the address. This highlights an important facet of storing data in the cloud. Have a backup. In this instance, I fail (no backup) and I’ll have to wait. A similar incident a few [...]

In your /etc/vsftpd.conf add: pasv_min_port=10000 pasv_max_port=10024 pasv_address=1.2.3.4 (Where 1.2.3.4 is your external public IP address.) Then: ec2-authorize default -p 20-21 ec2-authorize default -p 10000-10024 and restart vsftpd. What this does is configure vsftpd to use ports 10000-10024 for passive data transfers. Then ec2-authorize opens ports 20-21 and 10000-10024 for active and passive connections. I was [...]