[ec2-beta] Understanding Disk/Partitions Distribution in ami-18d73071

[Luis Ibanez]

    Thanks to all of you for your suggestions.


I followed the path of creating an EBS volume of 5Gb and
then mounting it into a sub-directory of

                /home/ubuntu/bin

Then I built our software in that directory and submitted
the test suite to our Dashboard:
http://www.cdash.org/CDash/index.php?project=Insight
(the build from the site:  "cirrus002.amazon.cloud.kitware").

That worked very smoothly.

---

In retrospective, it makes a lot of sense to separate
the instance itself from the storage of user data.

Your explanations were very helpful.


---

BTW: I had trouble unmounting the EBS volume.
      When calling umount, it kept reporting that
      the device was busy. I end up terminating the
      instance...

      Have any of you seen similar behavior ?

      Did I missed to do something before umounting
      the volume ?


    Thanks again,


       Luis


-------------------
Eric Hammond wrote:
> Luis:
> 
> EC2 instances are limited to 10GB on the root (/) partition.
> 
> There is about 150 GB free under /mnt on small instances.  Large and
> extra large instances have a lot more space, most of which is not even
> formatted or mounted.
> 
> For more information see:
> 
>   http://ec2types.notlong.com
>   http://ec2storage.notlong.com
> 
> This local storage is called "ephemeral storage" by Amazon and it
> disappears when the instance is terminated or fails.
> 
> As Rodney points out, for persistent storage that lives beyond the life
> of an EC2 instance, you will want to investigate Elastic Block Store (EBS):
> 
>   http://ec2ebs.notlong.com
> 
> --
> Eric Hammond
> ehammond at thinksome.com
> 
> 
> 
> Luis Ibanez wrote:
> 
>>First of all,
>>Thanks a lot for making these Ubuntu image available.
>>
>>This is great !.
>>
>>
>>--
>>
>>Background:
>>
>>I'm using the ami-18d73071 in oder to setup a machine
>>for testing Nightly builds of one of our open source
>>packages (www.itk.org).
>>
>>My first try was to download the source code to the
>>"/home/ubuntu" directory, and to try to build it right
>>there.
>>
>>However, it turned out that the size of the "/" directory
>>is rather small.
>>
>>Here is what I see with "df"
>>
>>Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
>>/dev/sda1              1548144    839580    629924  58% /
>>tmpfs                  3681752         0   3681752   0% /lib/init/rw
>>varrun                 3681752        68   3681684   1% /var/run
>>varlock                3681752         0   3681752   0% /var/lock
>>udev                   3681752      2516   3679236   1% /dev
>>tmpfs                  3681752         0   3681752   0% /dev/shm
>>/dev/sdb             433455904    840800 410596800   1% /mnt
>>
>>so the "/" partition was full before finishing
>>building half of the package.
>>
>>
>>---
>>
>>My question is then:
>>
>>    What will be the recommended location in the file system
>>    of the instance where I could put a source+binary tree
>>    that may reach the 3 to 4 Gigabytes ?
>>
>>
>>---
>>
>>Should I think that these files should rather go into a storage
>>bucket and that I should mounted and unmounted every time that
>>I launch the instance ?
>>
>>
>>
>>   Thanks for any advice,
>>
>>
>>      Luis
>>
>>
>>
> 
>