In this blog, accessing EC2 instance through ElasticFox and shell is demonstrated.

Installation of ElasticFox:

ElasticFox is a plugin for firefox, which enables ease of access to Amazon Web Services through a consolidated UI.

Download the plugin from the web.

You can get one from http://www.eaglegenomics.com/2011/05/elasticfox-aws-ec2-add-on-for-firefox-4-with-t1-micro-instance-support/

Connect to EC2 using ElasticFox:

1. After installation, restart your mozilla firefox browser. Goto tools>ElasticFox

2. In the UI, click ‘Credentials’. You will be asked for in a dialog box

    Account Name : <any string to identify>

    AWS Access Key : XXXXXXXXXXXXX

    AWS Secret Access Key : XXXXXXXXXXXXX

  Close the dialog box.

3. Please wait for 2 minutes, the plugin connects to your account automatically.
4. Goto ‘images’ tab. Locate for an ubuntu image (eg. ubuntu-9.10-karmic-server-i386-20100121). And launch it. And you will be asked to fill a dialog box.

5. Set instance type to t1.micro (default) which describes the type of instance you want. Number of instances 1 and Keypair to ‘ABCD’.

6. Set the security group (Security groups are assigned with firewall rules).

7. Once you launch, you can see the instance running on ‘Instances’ tab.

8. You can view the details of the images by clicking on it.

Access the launced EC2 instance through SSH:

1. open your terminal.

2. change the permissions of ABCD.pem file to 600. (eg. chmod 600 ABCD.pem)

3. enter the following command:

ssh -i <path to the keypair ABCD.pem file> ubuntu@<public dns of your instance found through ElasticFox UI>

4. You can install apache server.

5. Host an HTML file.

Access the website through browser:

open the browser, and enter your server address

eg. http://<public dns of your instance found through ElasticFox UI>:8080/xyz.html