Introduction

Every user as well as administrator of the linux system very often needs to execute some programs on regular basis.

For example, an administrator may need to monitor a disk usage of a system. In this case a cron scheduler is very handy tool to achieve this. Let's say that root needs to execute /usr/local/sbin/backup.sh script every Sunday at 2:36AM he would edit his crontab file as shown on the figure below:

# crontab -e 

The format is simple, 6 fields separated with spaces or tabs. The rest of the line is the command, and it's parameters to be executed. The sixth field - user name (in blue) is used only in the system wide cron scheduler.

This article describes a basic logic behind a Linux logical volume manager by showing real examples of configuration and usage. Although Debian Linux will be used for this tutorial, you can also apply the same command line syntax with other Linux distributions such as Red Hat, Mandriva, SuSe Linux and others.

This is what we are going to do

Author: Lubos Rendek

Introduction

This guide will provide all necessary steps on how to create, bundle, upload, run and connect Debian ETCH AMI on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). For this guide we have used a Ubuntu 9.04. However, any other Linux distribution can also be used as long as it contains java and ruby packages. For more information about Amazon EC2 read  here.

This page is not in any way an affiliate to Amazon Web Services. !

Prerequisites

• Internet connection
• registered user account for S3 and EC2 services with Amazon Web Services (AWS) 
• Amazaon Access Key ID
• Amazon Secret Access Key
• Amazon Account Number
• Amazon X.509 Certificate
• at least 1GB free hard drive space
• following packages need to be installed:

apt-get install ssh debootstrap ruby 
sun-java6-bin libopenssl-ruby curl 

Before we start

 As you will see in the next sections of this guide many different files are required to successfully use Amazon's EC2 Web Services. For the sake of simplicity, we will create a directory "aws" in ~/ and store all necessary files there for a quick access. There will be three exceptions:

This article explains basic commands for navigation within Linux file system. The diagram below represents (part of) a Linux file system know as Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. A line from one node to a node on its right indicates containment. For example, the student directory is contained within the home directory.