Amazon AWS Archives

How to replace an Amazon EC2 instance running CentOS and Plesk

In this video I will show you how you can replace a running EC2 instance with a larger one. You may want to do this if you find that you need bigger and better hardware to serve your website, or to move from a development system to a more powerful production system. In this example … Read more

How to allow passive FTP connections in Plesk on Amazon EC2

AWS LogoPassive FTP connections should work out of the box in Plesk. If no other firewall or NAT is interfering with it.

I’ve recently noticed that when I install Plesk on Amazon EC2 every passive FTP connection fails with an error such as “Server sent passive reply with unroutable address. Passive mode failed.”

The reason for this mishap is twofold:

EC2 instances are behind a NAT, and therefore have an internal (unroutable) IP, and an external (public) IP. When a passive connection request comes in, ProFTP – Plesk’s default FTP Server – tells the connecting client its internal private IP address, and in turn quite rightly fails to connect to it.

On top of that, we need to make sure to open a range of ports we want to use for passive FTP connections and tell ProFTP only to use those.

Let’s do all this this step by step!

Read more

How to deploy Plesk 11.5 on Amazon EC2 (Linux)

AWS LogoAmazon EC2 instances have seriously made my life a lot easier over the last year. And once you get the hang of the management console it’s actually not as scary as I always thought it would be 😉

I’d like to get away from annual contract bindings and “real” servers that could develop hardware faults. But if you wanted to run Plesk on top of CentOS then this was a bit of a headache – until Parallels launched their Plesk AMI on Amazon Marketpalce. With this release we get the convenience of running Plesk out of the box with a convenient one-click install!

I’ve just tried it and took some notes so I won’t forget. You can also take a peek at the KB Article provided by Parallels which also outlines this procedure:

Read more

How to mount an EBS Volume in Linux

Once you’ve created an EBS Volume in the AWS web interface and attached it to an EC2 instance, how do you actually use it on your virtual server? Here’s how! The following commands assume you’re logged into your system as root. I’ve created a 13GB volume and attached it to my running instance. Before we … Read more