Amazon, the giant has a beautiful service called EC 2 that lets you use their vast computing resources and super high speed internet network to setup your own server. The server is just like your computer except that you don’t control or own any hardware.

You get a command line through which you can access EC 2. In these tutorials I’ll be teaching you how to setup EC 2 starting with the basics. We will setup a remote access using an NX client, run OpenERP, Dropbox and an OpenVPN service.

Step 1:

Go to http://aws.amazon.com and signup for an account.

Once you are done with it click on the EC2 tab. Click on Instances—> Create new instance. You’ll see a window like the own below.

Click on Community AMI’s and search for ami-3e02f257

This is a Ubuntu Linux 10.0.4 micro instance and this is what we will be using for all my tutorials. Select it to head to the next step.

Step 2

Micro Instances are free for a year but have very low system resources. If you want a better server subscribe to one of the many plans that suit you.

 

Step 3

It’s a Kougon instance ! Next Step

Step 4

Create a key pair, you’ll need this to login to your EC 2 instance via putty or other SSH clients. Save this key in a very very secure place. It will have an extension of *.pem

That’s it. Your instance is now ready to rock.

Step 5-1 : Connecting to the Instance

Get Putty from the official site here http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

I’d prefer using the Install Everything Installer. We will require Putty & Puttygen for the next few operations.

Putty cannot use the *.pem key that Amazon gave you when you generated the key and this has to be converted into a putty friendly *.ppk format. To do this…

Open Puttygen – > Click on Conversions in Menu Bar –> Click on Import Key.

Now you will see some weird data. That’s the key. Now click on Save private key

It will ask you if you really want to do it. Just do it. Save this ppk file just as safely as the pem file.

Step 5-2: Connect with Putty

Putty Should look like this.

The host name can be found in the AWS console. Click on your EC2 instance and note down the public DNS address listed under Description.

The other option that needs to change is Connection –> SSH—>Auth. It should look like this

The location of private key file is obviously that super secret place where you saved the ppk file.

hit Open :)

Step 6: Putty’d

In the Putty console that opens up, it’ll say some stuff about trusting the connection. You don’t have much choice so hit “Yes”

It’ll then ask for an username: Type in  ubuntu

Congratulations on Successfully creating & logging into your first EC-2 instance.