Symetrik Domino Consulting

Posts Tagged ‘Cloud Computing’

I’m writing this blog post in the hopes that some wise soul out there happens to read this post and responds with the answer. I am truly stumped.

I’m running an instance store instance at Amazon. I would like to bundle a custom AMI in case something happens to the instance as it did to our instance a few days ago.

Our instance is built from a high availability, high performance AMI built by Pantheon. After we spin up the instance, we still have a bit of customizations. Namely setting up the mail/mailboxes, setting the hostname, installing Webmin, etc. etc.

We wanted to bundle our customizations into a new AMI in case something happened to the instance again and we could simply spin up a new instance from the AMI, change the public DNS and MX record, and re-attach the EBS volume where our /var/www and MySQL data is located.

After searching various and sundry locations on the web on how to re-bundle an AMI from a running instance, I came up with the following commands.

I’m using this command where 123456789123 is not my actual Amazon user ID, and I’ve copied my Amazon private key and certificate to the /mnt/ids directory.

$ sudo ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt/amis -k /mnt/ids/pk-*.pem -c /mnt/ids/cert-*.pem -u 123456789123 -r i386

I get the following:

Copying / into the image file /mnt/amis/image...
Excluding:
/sys/kernel/debug
/sys/kernel/security
/sys
/var/log/mysql
/var/lib/mysql
/mnt/mysql
/proc
/dev/pts
/dev
/dev
/media
/mnt
/proc
/sys
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules
/mnt/amis/image
/mnt/img-mnt
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1048576 bytes (1.0 MB) copied, 0.00273375 s, 384 MB/s
mkfs.ext3: option requires an argument -- 'L'
Usage: mkfs.ext3 [-c|-l filename] [-b block-size] [-f fragment-size]
[-i bytes-per-inode] [-I inode-size] [-J journal-options]
[-G meta group size] [-N number-of-inodes]
[-m reserved-blocks-percentage] [-o creator-os]
[-g blocks-per-group] [-L volume-label] [-M last-mounted-directory]
[-O feature[,...]] [-r fs-revision] [-E extended-option[,...]]
[-T fs-type] [-U UUID] [-jnqvFKSV] device [blocks-count]
ERROR: execution failed: "mkfs.ext3 -F /mnt/amis/image -U 2c567c84-20a1-44b9-a353-dbdcc7ae863b -L "

Here are the results of df -h, so I know I’ve got plenty of room on /mnt:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             9.9G  2.1G  7.4G  22% /
devtmpfs              834M  124K  834M   1% /dev
none                  851M     0  851M   0% /dev/shm
none                  851M   96K  851M   1% /var/run
none                  851M     0  851M   0% /var/lock
none                  851M     0  851M   0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sda2             147G  352M  139G   1% /mnt
/dev/sdf             1014M  237M  778M  24% /vol

Does anybody have any clue what the mkfs.ext3 errors are all about? I’ve posted this over at the Amazon EC2 discussion forum and the Pantheon Drupal group with no response and I have scoured google and I can’t find anything like this.

I’ve been working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) quite a bit recently.

I’ve also started working with Ubuntu at the same time. The result is the ability to quickly spin up new instances of Ubuntu server to use for various reasons without all the hassle of new hardware, or even alot of configuration headache. Using Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), an administrator can spin up an instance that is already configured, patched, and ready to run.

Using this technique and technology that is new to me has created a bit of a learning curve, and one thing that caught me off guard was the need to use keypairs instead of username/password to access the servers, which is more secure, and is the default method for accessing AWS EC2 servers.

I was able to easily figure out how to access an AWS EC2 using a keypair with SSH command line, and Filezilla, but MySQL Workbench seemed a little more complex.

Above you can see the diagram, which shows my new connection dialogue screen.
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog entry asking the community about your thoughts on Fedora/CentOS versus Debian/Ubuntu.

In the end, I decided that there was so much discussion going on about Ubuntu that I wanted to give it a try. So I’ve been using Linux Ubuntu 10.04 Lynx server. I’ve setup an instance at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2).

Overall, things seem pretty straight forward and there seems to be quite alot more documentation out there about how to use/configure Ubuntu. There is definitely a larger community. I’m coming from cPanel (on CentOS 5) to Ubuntu, so I’m really coming from the cPanel discussion forums/”How To” blogs to the Ubuntu discussion forums/Blogs.

Working with EC2 has been quite a steep learning curve, but there are loads more possibilities, such as the ability to detach a storage volume, shut down a virtual machine, and start up a larger, more robust virtual machine and re-attach the volume in just a few minutes with little planning or preparation.

It is a little tedious working with the sudo command however. I’ll have to admit that it is hard getting used to using it all the time.

Are there any others out there using EC2 extensively?

I’ve been running a CentOS 4 box (which was eventually upgraded to 5.0) for quite a few years now. I wouldn’t say that I’m a total command line *nix guru, but I’ve enjoyed managing the server and learning a few things over the years other than Windows NT/2000/2003/2008.

I’m about to move some web servers from a dedicated CentOS LAMP box at a traditional hosting environment to Amazon Web Services.

There is quite alot to consider and there seems to be more architecture planning involved in running a system there at Amazon’s service and a little bit different way of doing things than the traditional web hosting environment, but it also opens up a great potential to testing out dev servers or rolling dev servers into productions servers, etc. etc. not to mention the scalability and redundancy offered.

While doing research, I keep seeing more and more and more about Ubuntu, which sparked me to do a little research and see what all the hubabub was all about.

I’m now considering running Linux Ubuntu 10.04 Lynx server as my server instead of CentOS.

Does anyone out there in the Lotus blogosphere have any experience with moving from Fedora/CentOS to Debian/Ubuntu flavors? If so, I’d love to have a casual chat. More importantly, is anyone using Amazon Web Services? It seems like quite a considerably more complex operation than throwing a few physical boxes in a rack and being done with them.