Cloudmin Paid AMI

Cloudmin Paid AMI on EC2

Introduction to Paid AMIs

Amazon has recently launched a service called DevPay where commerical software like Virtualmin Pro can be purchased to run on their EC2 service. This means that instead of creating an EC2 instance and installing Cloudmin on it manually, you can instead use an image that has it pre-installed, and available for immediate use. We how have an AMI available that contains Cloudmin 2.6, with support for managing EC2 instances only.

Pricing

Subscribers to the paid AMI for Cloudmin are charged $25 per calendar month. In addition, regular EC2 per-instance-hour and per-megabyte charges apply. And any additional instances you create using it will be charged at normal rates.

Using the paid AMI

To use the Cloudmin paid AMI, the steps to follow are :

  1. Sign up for an Amazon EC2 account on their registration page.
  2. Follow Amazon's getting started instructions to install the needed tools, in particular the Prerequisites, Setting up an Account and Setting up the Tools pages.
  3. Purchase the Cloudmin AMI subscription, which will be charged to your Amazon account.
  4. Once you have the ec2 commands working, use the following command to list available Virtualmin AMIs : 

    ec2-describe-images -o 541491349868

    You should see at least one in the available state.

  5. Setup an SSH key with the commands :

    ec2-add-keypair vgpl-keypair >~/.ssh/id_rsa-vgpl-keypair
chmod 700 ~/.ssh/id_rsa-vgpl-keypair
  6. Start a new instance with the AMI for Virtualmin Pro with the command : 

    ec2-run-instances ami-972aecfe -k vgpl-keypair

    This will output the new instance ID, which is like i-10a64379

  7. Check its status with the command : 

    ec2-describe-instances

    You will need to wait until it is in the running state. You will then be able to see the public hostname, which looks like ec2-72-44-33-55.z-2.compute-1.amazonaws.com .

  8. Open the needed firewall ports with the commands : 

    ec2-authorize default -p 22
ec2-authorize default -p 25
ec2-authorize default -p 10000
ec2-authorize default -p 10001
ec2-authorize default -p 10002
ec2-authorize default -p 10003
ec2-authorize default -p 10004
ec2-authorize default -p 10005
ec2-authorize default -p 10006
ec2-authorize default -p 10007
ec2-authorize default -p 10008
ec2-authorize default -p 10009
ec2-authorize default -p 53
  9. Try a test SSH login with the command : 

    ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa-vgpl-keypair root@ec2-WHATEVER.compute-1.amazonaws.com
  10. Connect to Webmin at the URL 

    https://ec2-WHATEVER.compute-1.amazonaws.com:10000/

    The initial login is root and password is changeme .

  11. Click on the Webmin link in the top-left, open the Webmin category, click on Change Language and Theme, and enter a new password!
  12. If some packages are not up to date, they will be displayed on the System Information page that appears after you login. Click the Install All Updates Now button to have them automatically fetched and installed.

Using Cloudmin on EC2

The version of Cloudmin that the paid AMI installs doesn't have all the features of the full version, such as the ability to manage Xen instances, Linux Vservers and Solaris Zones. Instead, it is limited to creating, managing and protecting EC2 instances.

Before you use Cloudmin to control EC2 instances, you must add at least one account with the following steps :