[ec2-beta] EC2 tools in most recent official Ubuntu AMIs

[Eric Hammond]

Dave

There are two different sets of command line tools from Amazon:

- EC2 AMI tools
  http://ec2amitools.notlong.com
  Used for bundling, uploading
  Written in Ruby
  Pre-installed on many public images (including Ubuntu)
  Nobody else has written replacements as far as I know

- EC2 API tools
  http://ec2apitools.notlong.com
  Used for managing instances, EBS, elastic IP, security groups, etc
  Also used to register an AMI (unintuitively)
  Written in Java
  Generally not included in public images by default
  There are lots of other options including command line, web, plugins

I'm not able to look at your permissions problems right now, but
hopefully somebody else can pitch in.  Or, ask for help on
http://ec2forum.notlong.com where others have run into similar issues.

I do agree that it would be nice to always have the latest AMI and API
tools available in the Ubuntu repositories for all releases of Ubuntu.

--
Eric Hammond
ehammond at thinksome.com



Dav Clark wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to bundle an image with a variety of specialized (painful /  
> slow to install) software for brain imaging research.
> 
> I tried creating and uploading a bundle using the instructions here:
> 
> http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/GettingStartedGuide/index.html?creating-an-image.html
> 
> This was based on the most recent canonical 32-bit 8.10 / intrepid  
> images (ami-5059be39, aka canonical-cloud-us/ubuntu-intrepid-20090422- 
> i386.manifest.xml).
> 
> Creating the image and uploading the bundle appeared to go fine.   
> However, there was nothing like an ec2-register command.  No problem,  
> I thought, I'll just use the ec2 tools on my machine in lab.  But still,
> 
> BUG 1: ec2 tools on the canonical images are out of date / incomplete
> 
> Note - they are using the ruby versions... I don't know if the lack of  
> ec2-register is a ruby thing or what.  ec2-ami-tools-version on the  
> canonical image yields:
> 
> 1.3-31057 20071010
> 
> Moving along...
> 
> There appears to be some sort of strange permission problem using ec2- 
> register from my home machine.  With the permissions left as they  
> were, I get a 403 error trying to access my manifest.  But I don't  
> understand why:
> 
>   - I am absolutely sure I used the same pk and cert files (I uploaded  
> them from the machine in lab that I'm now trying to use the ec2- 
> register command from)
>   - I updated to the most recent EC2 tools (1.3-34128 2009-03-01), and  
> also tried 1.3-30349
>   - i am able to launch ec2 instances, for example, with no problem
>   - za-team has read access to everything, my account has full access  
> to everything
>   - If I make everything readable to "authenticated users" I get the  
> following 404:
> 
> Client.InvalidManifest: HTTP 404 (Not Found) response for URL http://s3.amazonaws.com:80/cognac-public/CognAcAMI.manifext.xml 
> : check your manifest path is correct and in the correct region.
> 
> I also was able to find a link in an amazon developer forum to the  
> 31057 version of the tools.  But, there is no mention of these tools  
> on the amazon website:
> 
> http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=87
> 
> I think I am missing something fundamental here... is there some old  
> way of booting an AMI that I don't know about?  The old docs on  
> bundling seem to have evaporated...
> 
> Thanks!
> Dav
> 
> 
>