Sunset Lake Software - Comments for "Running a Drupal website on Amazon EC2"

Here's a version of

Here's a version of Elasticfox compatible with Fx 16:
http://www.eaglegenomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/elasticfox.xpi

Hello Brad, THANK YOU for

Hello Brad,

THANK YOU for this guide. In fact, this is one of the best AWS guides I've seen online so far. I did a few tests on your website, and your download times and page load speeds are amazing. I'm planning to move my website to EC2 sometime by the end of the year. I've printed this page and will study it thoroughly before making a move.

Thanks again,

Very Interesting Post! Thank

Very Interesting Post! Thank You For Thi Blog!

Ok, re:PuTTY. The downloaded

Ok, re:PuTTY. The downloaded keys have to be loaded into PuTTYgen, then saved back out in PuTTY format which has a bunch of other stuff in it. Carriage returns had nothing to do with it. Probably the extension didn't either.

Brad, well, I got Drupal

Brad, well, I got Drupal running using the ami-238fdf66 AMI. It is an AMI that automatically assigns a 10 GB partition. The most significant problem I had was using PuTTY on Win 7 - PuTTY MUST have a ppk file extension on the key file, not the default pem extension that AMI provides - after changing all CRLF to LF only, and then making sure there was LF at the end of the file (nor sure if that was relevant or not). The error in the CMD window trying to connect to the instance: Unable to use this private key file

This might be good to have in your docs if you want. It would have saved me half a day.

The site is open to the world now, but the problem is I can only manage Drupal and MySQL from 127.0.0.1, so to "make things easier" I tried to install Ubuntu desktop (which is also a prerequisite for MySQL workbench which I prefer over phpMyAdmin).

After receiving the following errors ...

gdm-binary[32519]: WARNING: Unable to load file '/etc/gdm/custom.conf': No such file or directory
gdm-binary[32519]: WARNING: Unable to find users: no seat-id found
gdm-binary[32519]: WARNING: GdmDisplay: display lasted 0.152009 seconds
gdm-binary[32519]: WARNING: GdmDisplay: display lasted 0.023403 seconds
gdm-binary[32519]: WARNING: GdmDisplay: display lasted 0.023163 seconds
gdm-binary[32519]: WARNING: GdmDisplay: display lasted 0.083887 seconds
gdm-binary[32519]: WARNING: GdmDisplay: display lasted 0.084388 seconds
gdm-binary[32519]: WARNING: GdmDisplay: display lasted 0.022984 seconds
gdm-binary[32519]: WARNING: GdmLocalDisplayFactory: maximum number of X display failures reached: check X server log for errors

I created an empty custom.conf file, and no joy as follows:

gdm-binary[32634]: WARNING: Unable to load file '/etc/gdm/custom.conf': File is empty
gdm-binary[32634]: WARNING: Unable to find users: no seat-id found
gdm-binary[32634]: WARNING: GdmDisplay: display lasted 0.121960 seconds
gdm-binary[32634]: WARNING: GdmDisplay: display lasted 0.025222 seconds
gdm-binary[32634]: WARNING: GdmDisplay: display lasted 0.087903 seconds
gdm-binary[32634]: WARNING: GdmDisplay: display lasted 0.023778 seconds
gdm-binary[32634]: WARNING: GdmDisplay: display lasted 0.022826 seconds
gdm-binary[32634]: WARNING: GdmDisplay: display lasted 0.114782 seconds

Then I followed instructions to purge and load new nvidia drivers. The purge worked however apt-get failed to find new drivers - seems to be a repository problem:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-185
E: Couldn't find package nvidia-glx-185

I'm working on that now. If this ends up being a good AMI with the caveats, I'll let you know.

Glad that you like the

Glad that you like the tutorial. Honestly, I published it as much for myself to use as a reference in the future as for other people to read.

Have you read my updated article, where I describe how to set up an EC2 micro instance? In my walkthrough there, I now use an Ubuntu-based AMI, which might be ideal for your purposes. However, pretty much everything translates well between the CentOS instance here and a Ubuntu one.

Brad, this is wonderful for

Brad, this is wonderful for someone like me.

I'm a .NET architect with 25 years Windows experience, but quite a Linux newbie. I have experience with PHP and Drupal under Windows. I have had some cross platform responsibilities doing some bash scripting with Fedora. And, have done quite a bit of PHP programming under Windows. I've learned what little I know about the deployment of Linux apps from tutorials such as yours, but yours seems to be the most comprehensive I've seen. I have a couple of questions.

1. I'm running two instances of Ubuntu under Virtual Box and have become more familiar with that as opposed to my Fedora experience. Would your cookbook be easily transferable to Ubuntu using apt-get, etc. for example.

2. If #1 seems realistic for someone of my skill level, is there an Ubuntu AMI you could recommend.

Thanks,

Bill

Answering my own question:

Answering my own question: one solution is SMTP or PHPMailer module for Drupal:

http://drupal.org/project/phpmailer

phpmailer even includes detailed instructions on how to use your google account for outgoing mail.

My site is up and running on

My site is up and running on EC2 thanks to this incredible article - not sure if I could of done it without it.

But outgoing emails do not work - Drupal shows an error that it was unable to send emails.

Anyone else have this problem? Or can anyone point me to a tutorial or advice on this?

Incredible article!

Incredible article! Thanks!

Now that I have my elastic ip, what options do I have for nameservers? with rackspace cloud servers, they have a nameservice to use. you just use a widget to enter your A, C, and MX records.

Does Amazon have similar, or do I need to find a tutorial on how to set-up a nameserver? or do you use some 3rd party service?

thanks for any pointers!