Marc Valk dot Net

Yesterday Amazon announced some cool new feature on their EC2 platform: Boot your instance  from EBS (Amazon Block Store).
Your root partition of your image will be EBS, so this will give you the ability to:

fine-grain control of software and data configuration
increase the size of the local disk up to 1TB in size
boot [...]

Whenever you got an EBS Disk which size is not sufficient enough anymore, you can easily make it larger. Here’s how (OS: Windows off course).

First of all create a snapshot of the volume (the larger the disk, the longer it takes)
Create a volume from your snapshot and give it a greater size
Detach your original volume [...]

In an earlier article I spoke about disabling time zone changes and machine name changes of an Amazon Machine Instance.
You can also do this by use of a graphical interface. Just startup: “C:\Program Files\Amazon\Ec2ConfigSetup\Ec2ConfigServiceSettings.exe”

Whenever you start or restart your Amazon Instance, it will change your time zone back to GMT (if you changed it). As I am going to install Microsoft SQL Integration Server and Microsoft SQL Reporting  Server, I want the time zone to be GMT+1.
To stop Amazon to changing the Time Zone:

Open %programfiles%\Amazon\Ec2ConfigSetup\bundleconfig.xml
Change the SetSysPrep [...]

If you configured your instance you might want to save a backup of it. You can save this instance to S3 storage.
You first have to create a bucket which will hold your files (an instance will be saved to severall “zipped” parts). A great tool is s3 browser, you can download a free version [...]

When I was configuring IIS on my 32 bits small instance, it asked me for the windows installation files (i386). You can attach these to your image as an EBS (Elastic Block Storage) volume.

In your AWS Management Console navigate to “Volumes”
Create a new volume and give it a minimum size of 2 GB
Be [...]

I recently added an article in which I took a first look into Amazon AWS. I used the commmand line tools, this time I’m gonna use the provided AWS Management Console.
On first login, my first thought is that this probably is easier than the command line tools. First of all I’m going to change the [...]

EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud. It is a web service that enables you to launch and manage Linux/UNIX and Windows server instances in Amazon’s data centers using APIs or available tools and utilities. You can use these instances to do all kind of things. Say you’re hosting a website and suddenly your site gets [...]