About stuff people couldn't care less about!
Well, I’m getting off this EC2 ride and moving my servers back to Oz over the next few days.
Its been a wild ride and have learned heaps about the EC2 solution, its shortcomings and strengths. In all, I don’t think its an affordable solution for someone like me that just wants to host some machine images for serving websites etc. I’ll write more later, at the moment I moving house – so to speak.
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Here are a few things I have recently learnt about EC2 instancess:
1. I think (but am yet to test again and confirm) an attached EBS will be dropped when you create an AMI from a currently running Instance.
2. Before you apt-get upgrade create an AMI as a back up, its just to much heart ache creating eveything again – especially when its a “I’ll just do this before I go to bed l” late Sunday night and then don’t get to be till 1am because your last AMI was created a week ago and now you have to rebuild a recently installed wordpress blog.
3. Make sure you at least attach an EBS and mount it to store your email, at least then when 2 above happens your golden for your emails.
4. Seriously consider moving mySQL db to an EBS volume, wehn your micro instance falls over you have lost everything since the last AMI was created (or the last backup at least).
Well I have flicked the switch on my email server at EC2 and its humming away as I write this.
So far so good but still some wrinkles to iron out, in particular the odd IMAP folder mapping that courier has (as opposed to my dovecote of old) and some issues that this is causing me on my Android Phone. With luck I will figure that out shortly.
Last thing to move will be a forum that I host for a motorcycle club I am in and then the ESX box can get turned off. I’m having a few issues with move on the forum as the MYSQL db is a different version on my old installation as compared to the EC2 instance and they are not playing nice together when I try to import the MYSQL dump.
The complication now is that I run my Subsonic server on a Fedora VM so it will be a bummer to have to turn that one of especially given I have licensed the subsonic server – lets hope I can use the registration serial number again.
Hello all.
If you are reading this you are in fact reading it from my new snazzy EC2 instance at amazon, sweet hey! With luck it will be a cheaper way to host my websites as opposed to the power bill that I seem to be incurring at home with my dual Xeon CPU old clunker.
