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Here are the Top 12 referrers to our blog over the past 3 months, the numbers of referrals are in parentheses.

1. http://pro-linux.de/berichte/ext4/ext4.html (546)
2. http://dabcc.com/article.aspx?id=9653 (342)
3. http://networksecuritytoolkit.org/nst/index.html (110)
4. http://polishlinux.org/apps/cli/ext4-defragmentation-with-e4defrag/ (59)
5. http://communities.vmware.com/thread/189804?tstart=0 (49)
6. http://techblog.41concepts.com/2008/03/31/shrink-your-windows-disk-image-on-wmware-fusion-mac/ (42)
7. http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/01/09/amazon-launches-ec2-console/ (37)
8. http://wordpress.com/tag/vhd/ (33)
9. http://wordpress.com/tag/vmdk/ (32)
10. http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/updated-homebrew-esx-hardware-list.html (32)
11. http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2005/07/30/445621.aspx (32)
12. http://kakku.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/virtualbox-shrink-your-vdi-images-space-occupied-disk-size/ (31)

Thank you for the referrals. Hope the content is meaningful for our readers.

Mike Culver, technology evangelist for Amazon Web Services announced the availability of a web-based management console for ec2, the Elastic Compute Cloud.

The key features are summarized by James Urquhart and by Saad Ali Abassi.

Alan Williamson offers a visual tour of the new UI.

As an AWS customer, I feel heartened by this investment on Amazon’s part because it emphasizes their commitment to commoditize AWS and make its services widely usable. The AWS services will become cheaper as usage ramps up on the commoditization curve and makes “cloud computing accessible for the masses“

1. Open ElasticFox; Open tab AMI and Instances
2. Select an AMI Instance to suit your needs and launch it as described here
3. You will be shown the Launch New Instance dialog box
4. Select the Instance Type as small or large
5. Select the key pair you want to use. There might be just one in the dropdown if you are the only user, otherwise there can be one per member of your development team.
6. Select the Availability Zone in the same zone as your primary services and data. We chose us-east-1c because that is the zone where all our VM’s are currently running.
7. Select the appropriate Security Group, I chose pauls-sandbox, which was created as described here.
8. Press the Launch button to launch an instance of this AMI
9. The AMI instance is shown as running
10. Right click on the running AMI instance and select Connect to Instance. This should bring up a terminal window

You have got to remember at all times that Amazon EC2 is stateless, it will not remember things between one AMI instance to the next unless you have allocated persistent storage in Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) and maintain state there, e.g., .bashrc, etc for logins.

1. Create a new volume in the Elastic Block Store (EBS) from the Volumes and Snapshots tab in ElasticFox
2. Attach this newly created volume as /dev/sdh with the AMI instance that you have just started
3. This causes the volume to be associated with the running instance