IT_Solution for Learning

First things first. When I say free I mean it’s free for a year. You will have to use the micro-instance, which is a 10gb HDD, 613mb ram and I quote

Up to 2 EC2 Compute Units (for short periodic bursts)

(Don’t ask me the mhz on that….) Its plenty fast enough for terminal use, VNC for a basic desktop, programming etc…. You will need a credit card and a cell phone. A visa gift card and a prepaid phone will work. Lets sign up. The signup process is pretty straight forward. They will call your cell phone to have you put in a pin number. If you do this wrong to many times you will be blocked from signing up for 24 hours. Once the sign up process is complete sign in and click the EC2 tab. You may get pop ups that ask if you want to stop a script, click no, the AWS console can be a bit slow in loading. Click ‘Launch Instance’ The instances with gold stars are the free micro tier instances and the ones you should pick unless you want to pay. You can also browse under ‘Community AMIs’ for other distributions. Lets pick the ‘Basic 32 bit Amazon Linux AMI’. Click Select. You can only have 1 instance at a time for the free setup and it can only be a micro-instance. Click ‘Continue’. Place a check in the ‘Termination Protection’. Terminating an instance deletes the instance completely. The protection basically stops you from accidentally deleting it. On the next screen name your instance and ‘Continue’ The ‘Key Pair’ is the only way you will be able to SSH into your instance at the start. You can change your sshd config later so you dont have to keep the key around. You cannot download this key again so make sure you save it somewhere safe on this screen. Create a new key pair and select ‘Continue’. A ‘security group’ is essentially the firewall configuration. Choose the default one. It will already have the ports open for SSH. Your new instances is now running and you can connect to it. For SSH connection instructions right click on your instance and select ‘Connect’. Make sure to change the password when you connect for the first time. Notes: ‘Elastic IPs’ on the left side of the console are essentially static IPs. I usually assign one to my instance so I dont have to remember the long hostname. Not all community AMI instances connect the same. Make sure to check the ‘Connect’ box for each instance for specific instructions. You can check for any charges to your card by clicking your name in the top right and select ‘Account Activity’ Let me know if you have any trouble or need extra help. reference : http://www.get-root.com/?p=66