Arch Linux and EC2

I just wanna put this out there: Arch Linux is absofuckinglutely awesome.

I recently found out the hard way (specifically, cp: writing 'access.log': No space left on device) that the only Arch Linux AMI available, also being the one my server was created from, was set up very broken - for some reason, the creator saw fit to give the root drive only 1GB of storage space (ami-3132d758 if you’re curious). So I had to create my own Arch AMI from scratch. This meant I had to learn…

How to use VMWare
How to install a Linux on my own, from scratch
How to how to screw with partitions from a running Linux system without shutting it down
How to package a running Linux system up as an AMI and ship it off to Amazon’s S3
How to make an Amazon AMI registered as public, so others could use it

After all of that, and numerous silly mistakes, I had a working instance booted from my own AMI, running Arch Linux, with a (relatively) generous 10GB root partition. Feels much better!

So, without further ado… pop an Arch, bitchez!

ec2-run-instances ami-f7c92d9e

If you’re interested in playing with Arch, pop and instance and play with it - it’s fully configured for EC2, so when you instantiate it, you can use your EC2 keychain pubkey to login to the root account (make sure to pass a -k argument to ec2-run-instances for this to work). Password logins are disabled by default, and a few other things are not quite standard (basic Ruby is installed for the EC2 tools, and whatnot)… but other than that it’s a fresh Arch install. I suggest you run the following updates after popping - Arch Linux is on a rolling release system, meaning that when you run these commands, you will then have a complete and upgraded Arch Linux install, as if you had installed from the absolute latest available disks:

pacman -Syu
pacdiff
pacman -Sc
# And again, incase the first one included a pacman update
pacman -Syu
pacdiff
pacman -Sc

The pacdiff commands will present you with updated versions of various system configuration files, ensure that your settings are copied into the new versions.

Anyway, I hope this AMI serves somebody well. It’s certainly making me happy!