Outline of the EC2 for Poets checklist

[Dave Winer]

Here's the checklist to launch a River4 instance on AWS.

http://demo.forpoets.org/testdocs/

It's just an outline, a checklist. It would be very helpful if a couple of people ran through the checklist and see if they get a functioning river on the other side.

You should be able to reboot the server and the river should come back up. 

You should be able to access it through port 1337, and watch the dashboard.

Beyond that, nothing else is functional. I want to burn this in for a little before going to the next step.

Dave

[Frank McPherson]

I'll try to walk thru this over the weekend. Any thoughts about how users will get updates to RIver4 as they come out? 

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GitHub repository: https://github.com/scripting/river4
How to ask for help: http://scripting.com/2014/03/19/howToAskForHelpWithSoftware.html
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[Dave Winer]

It has code in it that does the updates, automatically. ;-)

Dave

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[Frank McPherson]

I walked thru the checklist today and did run into a few problems. The first has to do with getting a public IP address for the instance. I don't know if this is the case for everyone, but my AWS account is configured for both "EC2 Classic" and something that Amazon calls VPC, which stands for Virtual Private Cloud. I think that if you create an instance for EC2 Classic then a public IP address is automatically assigned, but if it is created for VPC then it is not. Further, in my case, the option to create an instance as "EC2 Classic" was grayed out, I had to create it in VPC. 

The assignment of public IP addresses occurs on Step 3, Configure Instance Details. You need to be sure that the field "Auto-assign Public IP" is set to Enable. 

So, you do not want this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1833590/River4EC2Poets/ConfigInstanceDetailsNotThis.png 

You want step 3 to look like this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1833590/River4EC2Poets/ConfigInstanceDetailsThis.png

You can confirm this configuration on Step 7: Review Instance Launch by expanding the Instance Details section and confirming that Assign Public IP is set to Yes. 

The other issue I had had to do with the Security Group instructions. I was not able to access the River4 Home Page nor the Dashboard until I enabled port 1337. Once I had my Security Group configured as follows, everything worked.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1833590/River4EC2Poets/SecurityGroupPort1337.png 

Your instructions conclude with configuring the OS X Terminal app to access the instance. Windows users will probably use PuTTY, the instructions for configuring that can be found here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/putty.html 

BTW, when I login to my instance, I can't find an obvious way to confirm that river4.js is running. I do a forever list and it is not showing. I know it is running because I am accessing the home page and the dashboard, but I imagine the only reason why most users will ever need to access the server is to start/stop/restart river4.js. I am guessing that perhaps with the automated updating of River4 users will have little to no reason to actually login to their server. 

I hope this helps.... 

[Frank McPherson]

It's been a while since I launched an instance in AWS. I did a little research and learned that you cannot launch a t2 instance in EC2 Classic, you must launch in to VPC, according to the doco here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-instances.html (From what I can tell, only people who have had AWS accounts a long time even see EC2 Classic as an option, new accounts only get access to VPC.) 

In fact, from my cursory review, by now it looks all new instances that you launch regardless of type must launch to the VPC network. I don't think there is a cost impact, but there appear to be more networking options that can appear to bring more complexity. Bottom line for our purposes is to be sure a public IP address is assigned to the instance. 

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GitHub repository: https://github.com/scripting/river4
How to ask for help: http://scripting.com/2014/03/19/howToAskForHelpWithSoftware.html
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[Dave Winer]

Frank, just a quick note of thanks for digging into this. 

I'm working in another area this week, but will use your notes when I swing back around to the ec2ForPoets project.

Good work, and very useful. ;-)

Dave

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