Having a server in the cloud is a nicety. That Amazon gives you one free for a year to tinker with… that’s being downright friendly!
The following are some notes/howtos for setting up an Ubuntu Amazon EC2 instance. I post them to help me remember them but they might also be useful to others…
Allow SSH Access
If you’d prefer to just ssh into your instance instead of using key/pair…
1. Login using the key/pair you created when setting up your EC2 instance:
|
1 |
ssh -i myprivatekey.pem ubuntu@55.55.55.55 |
2. edit your sshd_config file and uncomment and/or set PasswordAuthentication yes:
|
1 |
sudo pico /etc/ssh/sshd_config |
3. Reload SSH:
|
1 |
sudo reload ssh |
4. Create a new user and set the user’s password:
|
1 2 |
useradd NAME passwd // enter password twice... |
Install LAMP
1. Update Ubuntu’s package database, install and run Taskel. Select the LAMP server (don’t deselect anything that is also checked) and let it install:
|
1 2 |
sudo apt-get update sudo tasksel |
2. Install PHPMyAdmin; select Apache2, enter a root password and say No to config the database later:
|
1 |
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin |
3. Verify by going to: http://myIPaddress/phpmyadmin and login as root with the password you entered. Of course you’ll probably want to secure/move this!
Install XRDP on Ubuntu 12.10
Installing X11 on your instance–should you be so inclined–may prove tricky… I tried MANY ways of doing it (OpenBox/FluxBox, VNC, etc…) but each attempt ended in failure. I found victory with XRDP!
1. Found from the instructions here. First install Gnome (will take a while)…
|
1 2 3 |
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install -y ubuntu-desktop |
2. Ubuntu 12.10 no longer includes gnome-session-2d, so install fallback and edit .xession to use it:
|
1 2 3 4 |
sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback pico .xsession gnome-session --session=gnome-fallback // add/change this line in .xession /etc/init.d/xrdp restart |
3. Edit Xwrapper file and set allowed_users=anybody:
|
1 |
pico /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config |
4. Create a new Security Group Rule for RDP(i.e. open port 590x (where x is the vncserver id))
5. Install RDP client on your local machine…
Install Chromium brownser on Ubuntu 12.10
FireFox is in need of Unity by default and it appears it doesn’t exist on 12.10. I wanted Chrome on there anyway but it didn’t work either. Chromium does:
|
1 |
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser |
