Public Tribblix AMI now available

There's now a public Tribblix AMI available to run on AWS.

This was built according to the notes I gave earlier. And is part of making Tribblix the illumos for everyone.

This is to be considered slightly experimental, and there are a couple of constraints:

First, the AMI is only available in the London region for now (I'm in the UK, so that's where I'm running things). I could make it available elsewhere, but there are costs associated with doing so and, as everything related to Tribblix comes out of my own pocket, I'm not going to incur costs unless there's a demonstrable need. If you want to run in a different region, then you can always copy the AMI.

Second, the size of the image is quite small. Again, there's a constraint on cost. But the idea here is that you wouldn't store any non-trivial data in the image itself - you would create an appropriately sized EBS volume, attach that and create a zfs pool for your data. The Tribblix repo server does just that - the package repo lives on the second pool.

So, how to use this? I'm going to assume some level of AWS familiarity, that you have an account and know basically how to use AWS, and that your account is set up with things like an ssh key pair.

Go to the AWS console, and navigate to the EC2 dashboard. Unless you've copied the AMI to the region of your choice, make sure you're working in London - the dropdown is in the top right:

Then hit the launch instance button:

Now you get to choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Click on "Community AMIs" and enter "Tribblix" or "illumos" into the "Search community AMIs" search box. At the time of writing, you'll only get one result, but more may appear in future:

OK, go and select that one. Then you can Choose an Instance Type. A great thing about Tribblix is that it's pretty lightweight, so the t2.micro - available on the free tier - is a good choice.

Click on "Review and Launch". On the next screen you can edit the storage to add an additional volume, but the one thing you must do is edit the security group.

If you leave it like that, you'll have no way to access it. So Edit it, and the simplest thing to do at this point is to create a new security group that allows ssh only, with the source being your own IP address, which you can get by selecting "My IP" from the source dropdown.

(I've got a saved security group that does just that, to let me straight in from home.)

Click on "Review and Launch" to go back to the main screen, and then "Launch". The is when you get to choose which key pair you can use to log in to your instance:

It will take a little while to start (although it's usually ready before the status checks say so), and you should then be able to ssh in to it (as root, with the key pair you set up).

ssh -i peter1-london.pem \
root@ec2-35-176-237-204.eu-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com

And you're good to go. What you do then is up to you; I'll cover some scenarios in upcoming posts. Be aware that the base AMI has a pretty minimalist set of packages installed, so you probably want to add some more packages or overlays to do anything useful.