Just Another Dang Blog » Cloud Computing

Setup EC2 and FileZilla with PPK file on Mac OS X

lopau — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 10:07:42 +0000

Coming from a Windows platform where I have tools like Putty to connect via SSH to our EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) instance on Amazon web services(AWS) and a tool like Pageant where I can load a .ppk key to allow me to connect my Filezilla client to connect via SFTP.

I had to do the same on Mac OS X which eventually took me a bit of time to figure out. So I’m writing this short tutorial to document how I got it configured, so I can refer to it in the future and also help out those having a hard time setting it up. This tutorial is basically for those users who connect to Ec2 from a Windows platform and then moved to a Mac OS X platform.

1. On Windows using a telnet application like Putty to connect via SSH, you require a .ppk key. So first thing is to locate your PPK key in Windows.

2. Next you need to convert the PPK key to an OpenSSH format. Using PuttyGen load the .ppk file and then save the .ssh file generated. (eg. files aws_rsa.ppk and aws_rsa.ssh)

3. Copy the .ssh file and the original .ppk file over to your Mac directory like the Documents folder

4. Next open up Terminal on your Mac and create a new directory

# mkdir ~/.ec2

5. Copy the .ssh file to the ~/.ec2 directory

#mv /Users/myUser/Documents/aws_rsa.ssh ~/.ec2/aws_rsa.ssh

6. Change the file permission

# sudo chmod 600 aws_rsa.ssh

7. Finally connect to your instance.

# ssh -i aws_rsa.ssh root@ec2-xxx-xx-xxx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Replace ec2-xxx-xx-xxx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com with your EC2 public address.

Hopefully you should be able to connect to your server instance then.

Next is straightforward, this is for using a GUI like FileZilla to connect to your instance.

1. Open up FileZilla then go to Preferences

2. Go under SFTP and click on Add Key

3. Browse over to your Documents folder where you saved your .ppk file

4. Create a new site and add the public address for the host and protocol as SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol), user as root and password leave as blank.

That should be it you should be it. You could now SSH using the Terminal or connect via SFTP using FileZilla. Happy cloud computing.

Wallstrip – Salesforce.com Inc (CRM) spoof

lopau — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 04:42:52 +0000

This is a spoof of Salesforce.com Inc – if you are not familiar with Salesforce.com its a company that provides cloud services like Software as a service (Saas) among one of their service which is gaining grounds as the new media for running business applications on the web instead of having physical softwares and hardwares to run your business. The guy here reminds me of my college instructor teaching fundamentals on statistics. LOL. Anal lick ticks!! Classic.

Cloud Experience

lopau — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 06:33:45 +0000

Got the chance to mess around with Amazon EC2 console. And was really amazed on how fast setting up a server with AMI(Amazon Machine Image) is. Just browse from already existing thousands of AMI then launch. That simple.

One experience though that I don’t like somehow are that these LAMP AMIs seems a little flaky. I was looking into CentOS LAMP AMI. First thing I do after connecting to SSH on the instance is check if all LAMP is working and what version they are on.

First AMI I selected, apache restart doesnt work properly, I get the

apr_sockaddr_get_info() error

tried troubleshooting it then finally quit. Terminated the AMI and launched another one.

Then on the next other instances I can’t connect to MySQL but Apache and PHP are working right.

ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock’ (2)

Terminated the instance again and started a new one but still get the same error on MySQL. The solution I found is to simply install all the updates to overwrite any corrupted files.

Simply yum

#yum -y upgrade mysql mysql-server php-mysql

Now my LAMP is working great and ready for more cloud computing.