Phil Chen

Phil Chen — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 18:05:16 +0000

I have recently been working on a open source project (hosted on Github) called Process Watch. It monitors processes and workflows in your Linux system for anomalies or situations which when arise trigger predetermined actions you designate. I wrote this in PERL in 2006 but I am rewriting it in Ruby with a lot more functionality. It’s been a lot of fun…

AWS EC2 64-bit CentOS 6.3 Public AMI ‘s (EBS and Instance-Store)

Phil Chen — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 23:27:53 +0000

For those of you looking for a 64-bit CentOS 6.3 AMI (Amazon Machine Image) to use or to create your own snapshot or custom AMI from, I have created both Instance-store and EBS backed Public AMI’s.

This is great if you just need a basic clean install of CentOS 6.3 or if you need to create your own custom image, read my blog How to create an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud EC2 Machine Image (AMI) CentOS 6 S3 Backed or EBS Backed and skip to “Steps to create a EBS Backed AMI from your S3 Backed Instance”.

You can find these AMI’s available in the Amazon Web Services Dashboard, or via the below links.

Instance-store backed AMI
https://aws.amazon.com/amis/64bit-centos-6-3-linux-on-public-ami

US East (Northern Virginia) – ami-d51d93bc
US West (Northern California) – ami-34f6d671
US West (Oregon) – ami-e49d16d4
EU (Ireland) – ami-605c5314
Asia Pacific (Singapore) – ami-d1733183
Asia Pacific (Tokyo) – ami-84b00a85
Asia Pacific (Sydney) – ami-2726b11d
South America (Sao Paulo) – ami-433fe75e

40 Gigabyte EBS Backed AMI
https://aws.amazon.com/amis/centos-6-3-built-on-a-40t-ebs-volume-created-by-phil-chen

US East (Northern Virginia) – ami-9dc348f4
US West (Northern California) – ami-e497b7a1
US West (Oregon) – ami-b866ed88
EU (Ireland) – ami-409b9434
Asia Pacific (Singapore) – ami-9ab4f6c8
Asia Pacific (Tokyo) – ami-1fd85d1e
Asia Pacific (Sydney) – ami-d2eb7de8
South America (Sao Paulo) – ami-df4c94c2

Also a great resource for free Realtime AWS uptime data is Systems Watch

Disclaimer:

You can use it as you like, however we (Phil Chen / www.philchen.com) are not liable for any of your use or misuse of the image. We offer this free image to help the community of cloud users and cloud builders.

2012 L-I-V-I-N, A Memorable Year!

Phil Chen — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 22:16:59 +0000

The modo for the year 2012 was “L-I-V-I-N”, as usual living life to the fullest, with no regrets. Well the year is over and I am happy to say I didn’t waste any time, and enjoyed every minute of it. The important elements in my life, family, friends, health, self improvement, career, and community all were successful in 2012, in the most fulfilling of ways.

Family

On August 16, 2012 my life elevated in the most amazing way, I got married to the love of my life Julia. We had our wedding in Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Chapel, with a reception in a penthouse suite amongst close family and friends. It was a day of fun, happiness and love. Here are the wedding photos.

Friends

2012 was also the year I got to be a part of a best friend Xan and his wife Kristen’s wedding. It’s good to know that time keeps on passing, but my friends and I are still the little kids I remembered horsing around, still trying to grow up.

The past year friends near and far made for a perfect time, a reminder to me to make an effort to hang out more.

Health

Working it… That’s all I have to say. 2012 exercise and getting in shape had become a part of life, and new goals have pushed me harder. Oh and lots of Muay Thai training.

I ran my fastest Half Marathon 1hr 48min 23sec almost 20 minutes faster then my previous fastest time.
I entered my first Muay Thai Amateur fight at a Team Quest Encinitas IKF tournament video here.
I cornered my first Muay Thai fight for a friend Stephen and fellow gym rat video here.
I got my body fat down to 13% from 16% (I know getting crazy here, but hey its still cool)

Career

2012 was the year of getting things done. Julia and I were able to launch mygraphs.com as well as implemented realtime cloud monitoring for systemswatch.com, both had been in the planning phases for quite sometime. With the magical design and development skills of Julia we were able to successfully bring both products out to the world. So far we have had a strong response and each day we continue to gain ground on making both initiatives better and better.

Also Givit a company I am a Co-Founder of, went from a cool IOS private sharing app to a easy to use full featured video editing IOS app that makes great highlight reels.

As you can see its been a busy year!

Community

Every year I raise money for Walk MS and 2012 wasn’t the best year but I did manage to raise $1100 from family and friends. Any amount going to a worth while cause is a good thing. Here is a graph showing the progress of my fundraising year over year, of course using mygraphs.com

Also in 2012 with the help of a donation to SDSU, Julia and I became SDSU Aztec Football and Basketball season ticket holders, something we had wanted to do for awhile. We both are Alumni and love eating junk food and watching our teams kick some butt. SDSU Football became Co-Champions of the Mountain West Conference, and got into the Poinsettia Bowl against BYU, which we got to see as well. Currently we are still in the middle of the basketball season but SDSU is doing well with a current ranking of 22 in the nation, not to shabby.

In Conclusion

Looking back on 2012, all I can say is I am a lucky man to have amazing friends and family to share great experiences with. That combined with the fact I love what I do for a living, I can’t complain and look forward to an even more exciting 2013! Oh yea, and the end of the world didn’t happen so that is cool too

How to use netfilter and iptables to stop a DDoS Attack?

Phil Chen — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 00:31:17 +0000

This how to article will go over stopping a DDoS attack when all you have access to is the targeted Linux host using netfilter and iptables. The two methods are either to simply drop packets from the offending IP/range or to only allow the offending IP/range X number of requests per second, if the range exceeds the requests per second rate traffic is dropped from the range.

*NOTE This method is for small attacks on services you are running on your Linux host. For large attacks using your gateway’s (firewall, load balancer, switch, or router) anti DDoS features maybe necessary or even having your ISP mitigating maybe the only option. I do often see attacks on HTTP from a hundred hosts or so and this article works on that scale.

Here is a example of a script for dropping packets from a offending IP/range lets say for our purposes the range is 206.250.230.0/24

#!/bin/bash
/sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -s 206.250.230.0/24 -j DROP
/sbin/iptables -I OUTPUT 1 -d 206.250.230.0/24 -j DROP
/sbin/iptables -I FORWARD 1 -s 206.250.230.0/24 -j DROP
/sbin/iptables -I FORWARD 1 -d 206.250.230.0/24 -j DROP

Here is a example of a script for dropping packets from a offending IP/range if it exceeds 30 requests per second lets say for our purposes the range is 206.250.230.0/24

#!/bin/bash
/sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -m limit --limit 30/sec -s 206.250.230.0/24 -j ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -I INPUT 2 -s 206.250.230.0/24 -j DROP
 
/sbin/iptables -I OUTPUT 1 -m limit --limit 30/sec -d 206.250.230.0/24 -j ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -I OUTPUT 2 -d 206.250.230.0/24 -j DROP
 
/sbin/iptables -I FORWARD 1 -m limit --limit 30/sec -s 206.250.230.0/24 -j ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -I FORWARD 2 -s 206.250.230.0/24 -j DROP
 
/sbin/iptables -I FORWARD 1 -m limit --limit 30/sec -d 206.250.230.0/24 -j ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -I FORWARD 2 -d 206.250.230.0/24 -j DROP

You can see your changes applied by running iptables -L command as seen below:

-bash-4.1# iptables -L
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination         
ACCEPT     all  --  206.250.230.0/24     anywhere            limit: avg 30/sec burst 5 
DROP       all  --  206.250.230.0/24     anywhere            
 
Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination         
ACCEPT     all  --  anywhere             206.250.230.0/24    limit: avg 30/sec burst 5 
DROP       all  --  anywhere             206.250.230.0/24    
ACCEPT     all  --  206.250.230.0/24     anywhere            limit: avg 30/sec burst 5 
DROP       all  --  206.250.230.0/24     anywhere            
 
Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination         
ACCEPT     all  --  anywhere             206.250.230.0/24    limit: avg 30/sec burst 5 
DROP       all  --  anywhere             206.250.230.0/24

How to Make a Video go Viral

Phil Chen — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 22:51:01 +0000

How do you make a video go viral is a question that has been tossed around quite a bit since the advent of video outlets such as YouTube. I am a Co-Founder at Givit and recently had a video go viral on YouTube and decided to share my experience. The video was of San Diego State University star basketball player Jamaal Franklin doing what people are considering the dunk of 2013 and possibly the dunk of the century.

The story goes I was sitting at home watching the SDSU basketball game against Fresno State, which was a close nail biter of a conference game, not to mention SDSU was ranked 15th in the nation and Fresno was unranked. Then it happened the SDSU star player Jamaal Franklin had a fast break with three defenders on him, and while running full speed he threw up a Alley-oop from the three point line against the backboard, leaping into the air like a long jumper and catching it for a slam dunk through three Fresno state defenders.

I couldn’t believe my eyes, so immediately I rewound my DVR and whipped out my iPhone and using Givit recorded the dunk on my TV. Using Givit within about 1 minute edited a instant replay slow motion effect and posted it to YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. I started seeing immediate views! And as I write this 1.5 days later have 132,006 views of my 17 second Givit video on YouTube. The video was embedded on Sports Illustrated, LA Times, the Union Tribune, and a slew of other sites.

Link to Video: http://youtu.be/0-stx17fY-I

So some key points I learned:

1) Have a App like Givit ready on your iPhone to capture an amazing event, Givit works great because you can edit and add effects combining multiple clips in minutes.

2) Share it to all your social media sites, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Google+ etc…

3) After sharing to YouTube make sure you have a good title but more importantly for searches YouTube cares most about the Description Section, even more then Tags. So make sure your description has good key words that you think people will search with.

4) Upload your video as soon as the event happens, when the buzz goes out people will start searching for it immediately and the person with the most plays gets the viral effect, later videos of the same event will seem not as good just from the play count number.

5) Add effects to your video to make it better then the others that will follow, with Givit I used the slow motion instant replay effect

I am by no means a expert at creating viral videos, however what I wrote above is all it took for me to have a popular video that has 130K views in 1.5 days and is on track to get 300K views in the next several weeks.

Phil

Phil Chen — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 20:37:13 +0000

Happy New Year everyone, hope 2013 brings you happiness and joy. To those who thought 2012 was your last Year here on earth, I guess you can be happy the Mayans just got tired of adding to their calendar and it didn’t really mean what you thought.

How to Tell if a MySQL Database is Being Used

Phil Chen — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:14:49 +0000

So the scenario goes you have inherited a some legacy systems and your auditing what is being used or not, since the old person in charge was bad at cleaning up after himself, with legacy servers strewn about and then… uh oh you come across a MySQL 5.x database server with multiple DB’s.

Assuming you can login to MySQL as root or something with similar privileged you can run the following to check the epoch time of the last update on each individual database (using MyISAM tables):

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(MAX(UPDATE_TIME)) as last_update FROM information_schema.tables WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA='replace-with-database-name' GROUP BY TABLE_SCHEMA;

Sample output to expect (you will need to convert your epoch time):

+-------------+
| last_update |
+-------------+
|  1316645223 |
+-------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

If you happen to be running Innodb you can use the following on a table to table bases:

SELECT update_time FROM information_schema.tables WHERE table_schema='replace-with-database-name' AND table_name='replace-with-table-name';

Sample output to expect:

+---------------------+
| update_time         |
+---------------------+
| 2011-09-21 15:47:03 |
+---------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Another good thing to do is check what processes are running:

SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST\G

Sample output to expect when no processes are happening:

*************************** 1. row ***************************
           Id: 20
         User: root
         Host: localhost
           db: NULL
      Command: Query
         Time: 0
        State: NULL
         Info: SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST
    Rows_sent: 0
Rows_examined: 0
    Rows_read: 150
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Another query you can run to find out what tables have changed in the past X hours is:
*Note this can be a intense query so do it when its the right time to

SELECT table_schema,table_name,update_time FROM information_schema.tables WHERE update_time > (NOW() - INTERVAL PUT-NUMBER-HERE HOUR);

Expected output would be something like this:
*Note the information_schema tables will pretty much always pop-up

+--------------------+-------------+---------------------+
| table_schema       | table_name  | update_time         |
+--------------------+-------------+---------------------+
| information_schema | COLUMNS     | 2012-12-19 19:07:48 |
| information_schema | EVENTS      | 2012-12-19 19:07:48 |
| information_schema | PARTITIONS  | 2012-12-19 19:07:48 |
| information_schema | PLUGINS     | 2012-12-19 19:07:48 |
| information_schema | PROCESSLIST | 2012-12-19 19:07:48 |
| information_schema | ROUTINES    | 2012-12-19 19:07:48 |
| information_schema | TRIGGERS    | 2012-12-19 19:07:48 |
| information_schema | VIEWS       | 2012-12-19 19:07:48 |
| your_apps_table1   | app1        | 2012-12-19 19:06:27 |
| your_apps_table2   | app2        | 2012-12-19 19:06:28 |
+--------------------+-------------+---------------------+
10 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Hope this gives a little help to your MySQL auditing adventures, obviously there are way more ways to check usage but these are a couple of simple ways.

How an AWS Outage Can Cause Issues Even When You’re in Multi-Availability Zones

Phil Chen — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 04:47:13 +0000

This is reposted from a blog I wrote for Systems Watch

Today Amazon Web Services experienced multiple degradations of service in one availability zone in Virginia region (us-east-1), which caused sites like Reddit, Netflix, and many more sites to lose service for several hours. Most posts and comments on the topic on Twitter or various articles bash developers or systems folks for being architected in a single zone. We have spoken and experienced first hand that a lot of companies regardless of being architected in multi-availability zones have been affected by a so called AWS single zone issue.

How is this possible? One of the most common complaints is that the glue that holds Amazon Web Services together is their management API stack. Some use the literal programmatic API libraries, others maybe AWS Management Console, and some RightScale, however they all are layers built on the AWS API Platform and when that goes all bets are off.

AWS API Errors and AWS Management Console Errors

The problem scenario occurs when you have an architected system across two or more AWS availability zones in Virginia (us-east), one of the biggest and oldest regions of AWS, and AWS has a outage in one zone specifically in that region.

The waterfall effect seems to happen, where the AWS API stack gets overwhelmed to the point of being useless for any management task in the region. Our guess is that either through AWS and client automated failover/scale up or due to the outage itself the API stack cannot handle the request load of all those affected, which leaves AWS users in the region unable to fail-over or increase resources to an unaffected zone.

Typically your organization cannot afford to have 100% capacity redundancy sitting idle all the time, it becomes a money issue. So if you have your resources in two zones with a 50/50 split, and you lose one zone 50% of your resources cannot handle 100% of the load causing degradation of the organizations services. To remedy this whether through automation or manual intervention you spin up the lost 50% of resources in a different unaffected zone to meet your demand.

This is where the problem often occurs when you can’t manage anything in AWS because their API’s are unavailable, you can’t spin up the lost 50% in an unaffected zone and are in big trouble and helpless. In a perfect world organizations are making so much money they have enough resources in one of the two zones to carry the entire load or better yet in multiple regions with mirrored capacity but most of the time this isn’t the case. This is often because management, not engineering, is willing to take the risk. So organizations feel that degradation is not a full outage and having 50% is better than 0% available resources. To the end user they are angry either way.

So as an AWS client when you lose all control to fail-over, scale up, or rebuild into a healthy zone and any redundancy you have is overwhelmed you have to wait hours for AWS to recover API service in order to gain any control and recover your resources.

This is our opinion of how an AWS outage can cause issues even when you’re in Multi-Availability Zones.

Also a great resource for free Realtime AWS uptime data is Systems Watch

How to create an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud EC2 Machine Image (AMI) CentOS 6 S3 Backed or EBS Backed

Phil Chen — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:51:43 +0000

This how to article will go over creating a Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Machine Image (AMI) S3 backed as well as EBS backed. In this particular example we are creating a Centos 6 64bit AMI from beginning to end. I wrote a blog about this topic in 2010 and decided to freshen it up a bit with a CentOS 6 build.

First you will want to hop on a CentOS 6 box you have available so that all the yum commands will work below.

This first step is to setup your basic environment to start building.

yum -y install e2fsprogs ruby java-1.6.0-openjdk unzip MAKEDEV
 
mkdir -p /root/.ec2
 
cp amikey.pem /root/.ec2
 
cp amicert.pem /root/.ec2
 
mkdir -p /opt/EC2TOOLS /data /opt/EC2YUM
 
curl -o /tmp/ec2-api-tools.zip http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip
 
cd /tmp
 
unzip /tmp/ec2-api-tools.zip
 
cp -r /tmp/ec2-api-tools-*/* /opt/EC2TOOLS
 
curl -o /tmp/ec2-ami-tools.zip http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-ami-tools.zip
 
cd /tmp
 
unzip ec2-ami-tools.zip
 
cp -r /tmp/ec2-ami-tools-*/* /opt/EC2TOOLS

Save your X509 certificates in the following directories:

/root/.ec2/amikey.pem
/root/.ec2/amicert.pem

cat <<EOT >/root/.bashrc
export PATH=\$PATH:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/opt/EC2TOOLS/bin
export EC2_HOME=/opt/EC2TOOLS
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.ec2/amikey.pem
export EC2_CERT=~/.ec2/amicert.pem
export JAVA_HOME=/usr
EOT
 
source ~/.bashrc

export RELEASE=6
 
export ARCH=`uname -i`

This step is to create your disk image and filesystem and file structure.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/data/CentOS$RELEASE-$ARCH-base.img bs=1M count=10240
 
mkfs.ext4 -F -j /data/CentOS$RELEASE-$ARCH-base.img
 
mkdir /mnt/ec2-image
 
mount -o loop /data/CentOS$RELEASE-$ARCH-base.img /mnt/ec2-image/

cd /mnt/ec2-image
 
mkdir -p proc etc dev sys var/cache var/log var/lock var/lib/rpm

cat <<EOT >/mnt/ec2-image/etc/fstab
/dev/xvde1    /        ext4        defaults,noatime,nodiratime    1    1
EOT

This step is to create your Yum conf that you will use to install the base OS

mkdir -p /opt/EC2YUM
 
cat <<EOT >/opt/EC2YUM/yum-ami.conf
[base]
name=CentOS-$RELEASE - Base
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$RELEASE&arch=$ARCH&repo=os
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$RELEASE/os/$ARCH/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-$RELEASE
 
[updates]
name=CentOS-$RELEASE - Updates
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$RELEASE&arch=$ARCH&repo=updates
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$RELEASE/updates/$ARCH/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-$RELEASE
 
[extras]
name=CentOS-$RELEASE - Extras
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$RELEASE&arch=$ARCH&repo=extras
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$RELEASE/extras/$ARCH/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-$RELEASE
 
[centosplus]
name=CentOS-$RELEASE - Plus
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$RELEASE&arch=$ARCH&repo=centosplus
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$RELEASE/centosplus/$ARCH/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=0
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-$RELEASE
 
[contrib]
name=CentOS-$RELEASE - Contrib
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$RELEASE&arch=$ARCH&repo=contrib
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$RELEASE/contrib/$ARCH/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=0
gpgkey=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-$RELEASE
EOT

yum -c /opt/EC2YUM/yum-ami.conf --installroot=/mnt/ec2-image -y groupinstall Base

yum -c /opt/EC2YUM/yum-ami.conf --installroot=/mnt/ec2-image -y install openssh-server yum-plugin-fastestmirror.noarch e2fsprogs dhclient

This step is to allow root login without password, since you will be using your key

cat <<EOT >>/mnt/ec2-image/etc/ssh/sshd_config
UseDNS no
PermitRootLogin without-password
EOT

Create devices so we can use chroot for the image

MAKEDEV -d /mnt/ec2-image/dev -x console
 
MAKEDEV -d /mnt/ec2-image/dev -x null
 
MAKEDEV -d /mnt/ec2-image/dev -x zero
 
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/ec2-image/dev
 
mount -o bind /dev/pts /mnt/ec2-image/dev/pts
 
mount -o bind /dev/shm /mnt/ec2-image/dev/shm
 
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/ec2-image/proc
 
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/ec2-image/sys

Create network settings

cat <<EOT >/mnt/ec2-image/etc/sysconfig/network
NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=localhost.localdomain
EOT

cat <<EOT >/mnt/ec2-image/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
ONBOOT=yes
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
NM_CONTROLLED=yes
EOT

Create grub.conf and boot settings so the Amazon Kernel Image can boot into the new Kernel

cat <<EOL > /mnt/ec2-image/boot/grub/grub.conf
default=0
timeout=0
title CentOS$RELEASE
root (hd0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/xvde1 rd_NO_PLYMOUTH selinux=0 console=hvc0 loglvl=all sync_console console_to_ring earlyprintk=xen nomodeset 
initrd /boot/initramfs
EOL

ln -s /boot/grub/grub.conf /mnt/ec2-image/boot/grub/menu.lst
 
kern=`ls /mnt/ec2-image/boot/vmlin*|awk -F/ '{print $NF}'`
 
kernver=${kern#vmlinuz-}
 
ird=`ls /mnt/ec2-image/boot/initramfs*.img|awk -F/ '{print $NF}'`
 
sed -ie "s/vmlinuz/$kern/" /mnt/ec2-image/boot/grub/grub.conf
 
sed -ie "s/initramfs/$ird/" /mnt/ec2-image/boot/grub/grub.conf

Create a script that grabs the public key credentials for your root login.

vi /mnt/ec2-image/etc/init.d/getssh
 
#!/bin/bash
# chkconfig: 2345 95 20
# description: getssh
# processname: getssh
#
export PATH=:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/sbin
# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions
 
# Source networking configuration.
[ -r /etc/sysconfig/network ] && . /etc/sysconfig/network
 
# Check that networking is up.
[ "${NETWORKING}" = "no" ] && exit 1
 
start() {
  if [ ! -d /root/.ssh ] ; then
          mkdir -p /root/.ssh
          chmod 700 /root/.ssh
  fi
  # Fetch public key using HTTP
/usr/bin/curl -f http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-keys/0/openssh-key > /tmp/my-key
  if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then
          cat /tmp/my-key >> /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
          chmod 600 /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
          rm /tmp/my-key
  fi
  # or fetch public key using the file in the ephemeral store:
  if [ -e /mnt/openssh_id.pub ] ; then
          cat /mnt/openssh_id.pub >> /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
          chmod 600 /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
  fi
}
 
stop() {
  echo "Nothing to do here"
}
 
restart() {
  stop
  start
}
 
# See how we were called.
case "$1" in
  start)
    start
    ;;
  stop)
    stop
    ;;
  restart)
    restart
    ;;
  *)
    echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop}"
    exit 1
esac
 
exit $?
###END OF SCRIPT

Make your script init ready

 
/bin/chmod +x /mnt/ec2-image/etc/init.d/getssh
 
/usr/sbin/chroot /mnt/ec2-image /sbin/chkconfig --level 34 getssh on

Clean up after yourself

yum -c /opt/EC2YUM/yum-ami.conf --installroot=/mnt/ec2-image -y clean packages
 
rm -rf /mnt/ec2-image/root/.bash_history
 
rm -rf /mnt/ec2-image/var/cache/yum
 
rm -rf /mnt/ec2-image/var/lib/yum

Check for what Amazon AKI’s are available you will need this info when starting your ec2 instance

/opt/EC2TOOLS/bin/ec2-describe-images -H --region us-east-1 -x all|grep "pv-grub-hd0"

Bundle your new image

/opt/EC2TOOLS/bin/ec2-bundle-image --image /data/CentOS$RELEASE-$ARCH-base.img --prefix ami-CentOS$RELEASE-$ARCH-base --cert ~/.ec2/amicert.pem --privatekey ~/.ec2/amikey.pem --user awsaccountnumber --destination /data --arch $ARCH

Upload your new image

/opt/EC2TOOLS/bin/ec2-upload-bundle --manifest /data/ami-CentOS$RELEASE-$ARCH-base.manifest.xml --bucket yourbucket --access-key accesskeyhere --secret-key secretkeyhere

I recommend you do this via the Amazon Web Services Management console, under IMAGES->AMIs “Register New AMI” you will just need to enter bucketname/manifest.xml file for your new AMI.

Steps to create a EBS Backed AMI from your S3 Backed Instance. *Only if you want an EBS Backed AMI do these steps

Step 1

Start your newly created EC2 instance

Step 2

Go into the Amazon Web Services Management console and create a Volume at whatever size you choose

Step 3

Attach your Volume to your new running EC2 Instance

Step 4

ssh -i yourkey root@yournewinstance

Step 5

Create your filesystem type in this case EXT4 then make a directory and mount it to the newly formated filesystem. After that we rsync the root of your ec2 instance, then unmount.

mkfs.ext4 /dev/xvdj
mkdir /mnt/ebs && mount /dev/xvdj /mnt/ebs
rsync -avHx / /mnt/ebs
rsync -avHx /dev /mnt/ebs
sync;sync;sync;sync && umount /mnt/ebs

Step 6

Go into the Amazon Web Services Management Console section Volumes and detach the Volume

Step 7

Go into the Amazon Web Services Management Console section Volumes and create a Snapshot of your Volume

Step 8

Go into the Amazon Web Services Management Console section Snapshots and select your new Snapshot and choose “create image” Fill in the name and description and the AWS AKI you chose in my case for us-east-1 I chose aki-08ed0761 for x86_64 bit hd0

Step 9

Start your new EBS backed AMI

Also a great resource for free Realtime AWS uptime data is Systems Watch

2011 No Regrets, An Awesome Year!

Phil Chen — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 05:12:29 +0000

At the beginning of 2011 I had one goal for the year, and that was to live it to the fullest, with no regrets. With the year behind me I am happy to say it has been a great success! All the important elements in my life, family, friends, health, self improvement, career, and community moved forward in 2011 in very positive ways.

Family

On May 29th I popped the question on my long time partner in crime Julia Holland and asked her to Marry me, at Pacifica Del Mar and with a small pause due to shock (very cute) she said Yes! This is the biggest thing to happen in my life, and I am looking forward to the future. Julia and I have had a great time experiencing what its like to be engaged. Below are two pictures one of Julia showing off her engagement ring and the other at our engagement party with both our families:

Also on Oct 1 I was honored to be the best man at my brother Eric and his new wife Janine’s wedding in San Francisco. I am very happy to see him enter a new journey in his life of happiness and excitement. I guess my brother and I are finally growing up a bit, and its nice to see the two of us lucky enough to find people to share our lives with. Below are some pictures from the Wedding:

Friends

2011 also has been a year of reconnecting with old life long friends and making new friends. Having a chance to hang out with people you have known since 2nd grade is always an amazing thing. My buddies Jeff and Xan don’t ever seem to change! Also I got to see my good friend Christie, bringing back old days working in Hermosa Beach.

As for new friends I have managed to meet some great new people after joining Carlsbad LA Boxing gym which I will talk about later in this post. As I get older I find trying new things is the perfect way to meet new people and make new friends.

Health

I would have to say 2011 has been the healthiest year I can remember for me. Both in watching what I eat and exercising a lot! The biggest change has been adding both Muay Thai Boxing and Yoga to my already crazy running training.

One of my goals I achieved was to earn the Triple Crown status, basically running 3 San Diego Half Marathons, Carlsbad Half, La Jolla Half, and the AFC Half in one year. In 2011 I had 464 Training Miles of running the most in a single year I believe I have ever run, quite the accomplishment for me, and getting the Triple Crown was pretty awesome.

The biggest change for me was joining Carlsbad LA Boxing, already in fairly good shape from all the running or so I thought. My first Cardio class almost brought me to the brink of puking. But 1 Year later I am happy to say I have graduated from just taking the Cardio classes to taking the Advanced Muay Thai classes as well and sparring a slew of fighters, and making some great friends. I went from weighing 155-160 lbs to now weighing 141-145 lbs and increasing my muscle strength and running speed by a huge amount, while having a blast. Special thanks to the Carlsbad LA Boxing Staff and new friends Samantha Schmitt, Adam Griffis, Alan Roach, Tony Burnett, and Owners Jeff Nason, Richard Montano. Here are some videos of me sparring, and slowly getting better.

Career

Work is always something that is often regarded as a have to, versus a want to do, but I am lucky enough to do something I love to do, which basically makes me a happy camper.

As a Systems Engineering Architect and Entrepreneur 2011 has brought great things such architecting the cloud computing systems infrastructure for a new Private Video Sharing Service GIVIT to re-inventing Systems Watch into a source for cloud computing realtime monitoring and a cross vendor cloud health gauge. Also with Julia leading the development effort we are very close to launching mygraphs a data visualization and graphing resource for anyone to use. As I have experienced in the past loving what you do definitely ends up showing in the product or service you develop.

Community

Every year I help raise money for various organizations to help research and fight disease, support animals, protect state and national parks, and more. But 2011 definitely was a year I am proud of for raising money for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. With the generous donations from good hearted people I was able to raise $1605.00 for the Walk MS event in Carlsbad, and make the 100 top donors list joining the 100 club. Here is a video of the event. Giving back to the community I think is very important and I hope I can have the means to continue doing so for years to come.

Also in 2011 Julia and I became SDSU Lifetime Alumni, having both graduated San Diego State University we felt joining the Alumni Association and giving back to the school that helped shape us as individuals was important.

New Things

Possibly the largest purchase of the year was buying a new 2011 SMART Car. So first off yes its safe with 8 air bags a Tritium Roll Cage that can withstand a 65 mile per hour crash protecting you from being crushed, and yes its fast enough for the HWY I have taken it to 90 mph and it has a performance paddle shifter mode. Best of all you can park it anywhere, the turning radius is ridiculous, it gets 44 mpg and is fun as hell to drive. For those that know me and my 65 Mustang it still my baby and I still drive it a lot

In Conclusion

I am happy the way 2011 went but I am even more excited for 2012. I hope to have an even longer blog next year! To conclude my 2011 end of year blog here is where you can see 365 pictures of 2011, a picture everyday. 365 Daily Photos of 2011