This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Phillip Pearson.
Original Post: Trying out Windows on EC2
Feed Title: Second p0st
Feed URL: http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/rss.xml
Feed Description: Tech notes and web hackery from the guy that brought you bzero, Python Community Server, the Blogging Ecosystem and the Internet Topic Exchange
Amazon announced today that you can run Windows on EC2. I'm giving this a go, as being able to spin up virtual Windows boxes on the other side of the world might come in handy one day. I don't see a HOWTO on Amazon's site, so here's a log of my attempt today.
I don't see a list of the public images, but searching for "amazon public images" window server 2003 on the Submit an AMI page brought up a few official-looking ones.
So, I start an instance: ec2-run-instance run ami-782bcf11 -k gsg-keypair -a public -i m1.small
ec2-describe-instances eventually tells me it's ec2-75-101-250-161.compute-1.amazonaws.com, so I try connecting to that with the Remote Desktop client. No luck - I guess I need to open port 3389.
I did that with ElasticFox because I don't remember the syntax for editing security groups. In ElasticFox, firewall permissions are under the Security Groups tab. Just hit 'refresh' under Your Groups, then select the appropriate one and add a new permission to allow traffic from 0.0.0.0/0 to port 3389.
You also need to get the password for the Administrator user. Under the AMIs and Instances tab, right-click on the Windows Server instance and select Get Administrator Password.
After all that, I could connect in with Remote Desktop without any trouble. I didn't have anything to do today so I just tried out Internet Explorer, found that it worked fine, and shut down the instance :)
Previous Topic
