[ec2-beta] /home on EBS and the ubuntu user

[Micah Walter]

I am doing this... I initially just moved /home to /vol/home and then  
created a sym link...

If I run a new instance I then mount the ebs, delete /home and create  
the link again... Seems to work just fine!

M



On Apr 27, 2009, at 11:21 PM, Eric Hammond <ehammond at thinksome.com>  
wrote:

> Steven:
>
> Since your instances launch without the EBS volume mounted, you have  
> the
> ability to ssh in to the ubuntu user with the EC2 keypair specified at
> instance run time.
>
> I don't see much of a problem with mounting an EBS volume over top of
> /home while logged in as ubuntu, but you probably would want to cd to
> the new /home pretty soon after so that you're not reading from and
> writing to a directory that is not accessible through the file system.
>
> This one of the few times where this nonsensical command makes sense:
>
>  cd $(pwd)
>
> Another option would be to pass in a user-data script which does the  
> EBS
> volume mounting for you.  This is run as root during startup.
>
> As far as re-connecting through ssh after overwriting /home, there  
> are a
> couple options:
>
> 1. You could have copied the original /home/ubuntu/.ssh/ 
> authorized_keys
> to a temporary place and then copied it back after /home was  
> remounted.
>
> 2. You could simply have your own ssh public key already stored on the
> EBS volume in authorized_keys, and use that for future connections to
> ubuntu and other users.  This could either be the EC2 ssh keypair key,
> or it could be your own personal ssh public key which you use to  
> connect
> to other hosts.
>
> --
> Eric Hammond
> ehammond at thinksome.com
>
>
>
> Steven Marcus wrote:
>> Hello all!
>>
>> My co has been using the alestic images since September08 and they've
>> been great.
>> Given that there are now "official" AMIs I thought I'd look at  
>> switching.
>>
>> The first issue for us in switching is that I can't simply mount an  
>> EBS
>> volume with /home as we have been doing.
>> This is because the official AMIs disable root and require login  
>> via the
>> ubuntu user.
>> The ubuntu user is scripted on instance start to enable ssh via
>> /home/ubuntu/.ssh/authorized_keys -- so we can't simply create a
>> "static" ubuntu user in our /home on EBS.
>>
>> Is keeping /home on EBS a reasonable thing to do with the official  
>> AMIs,
>> and if so, how?
>> It seems that mounting /home while logged in as anything other than  
>> root
>> is not a good idea.
>>
>> Thanks in advance!
>> S
>>
>
> -- 
> Ec2-beta mailing list
> Ec2-beta at lists.ubuntu.com
> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ec2-beta