Crazy Idea, Amahi on Amazon AWS micro (for free!), NAT trav.

[nuclear216]

hi,

I'm a happy amahi user since few years, the only big limitation I have in it's use is due to the fact that my provider put his consumer behind a NAT, so I can't be reached from outside (beside upload speed of home adsl in europe)

I know there are a few ways to bypass that, basically always a tunnel of some sort (I did looked into ipv6 tunnel broker) but as I stumbled upon latest amazon aws offer a crazy idea came to me:

this is the offer:
http://aws.amazon.com/free/

basically you get this free for one year, you pay for any overuse:
AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):
750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests*
5 GB of Amazon S3 storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out” across all services except Amazon CloudFront)*
25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**
100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service**

15GBIN/15GBOUT with 613MB ram and linux (fedora 12 is there as an image).

If I would register and install amahi on the AWS I'll have two amahi server, would it be possible to somehow "connect" those and make them work together?
Obviously on the AWS there's not much HDD space but there's upload speed and a public IP, the opposite home, so maybe there's a way to combine those two

I think I'll give it a try anyway just to see what happens and how aws works.
a few things:

1) I don't really know If I could VPN the two server together, from home I could ping AWS but not viceversa (there's the provider NAT in the middle), of course I can browse the internet and upload file to site so some port are open in the NAT, i think that if I tell AWS to be VPN server on port 80 than I could make a VPN connection from home and encapsulate lan traffic into it and bypass my provider nat, can anyone confirm this?

2) even if I can connect there's really no implementation of multiple amahi server (none needed), but i figure that if I do get to encapsulate lan traffic between the two server (aws and home) in a vpn tunnel than I could just export the home filesystem via vpn to aws filesystem and have two different amahi server, one to be reached from within my home network, one to be reached from the internet (aws) that virtually share the same file content (different apps, dns, etc.).

3) This would make my content reachable from the internet but it wouldn't solve the bottleneck problem of my home upload speed, is there a way to use the 10GB space on aws like a proxy does? sort of an intelligent cache?

[bigfoot65]

Anything is possible, however I don't believe you could easily hook 2 HDAs together. This is a very advanced setup. We do not support this type of setup, therefore cannot help.

However, there may be some users who can. As most know, we are a very small team of volunteers. Our priority right now is getting Fedora 14 and a new release of Amahi completed.

If you do have success, please share with the community in the wiki. Who knows, it might give us another platform to add down the road.

[nuclear216]

Anything is possible, however I don't believe you could easily hook 2 HDAs together. This is a very advanced setup. We do not support this type of setup, therefore cannot help.

Actually having spent the evening playing with AWS some friend of mine suggested a simpler setup:
home HDA: ssh endpoint
AWS Linux (any linux): ssh endpoint->forwards awsip:port to homeip:port thru the ssh tunnel

This way the AWS linux get queried and the services running on the home hda reply from behind the nat thru the ssh tunnel and at the end of the day it would work exactly like the above VPN method (which is feasible too btw) but it's simpler.
same plain port forwarding could be done with a VPN tunnel too by installing vpn software on the linux AWS, so if anyone wants to suggest something about VPN vs SSH I'm listening.

However, there may be some users who can. As most know, we are a very small team of volunteers. Our priority right now is getting Fedora 14 and a new release of Amahi completed.

You are doing a wonderful job and I thank you basically all day because I use amahi continuously and happily since a few years, u already received donation from me

If you do have success, please share with the community in the wiki. Who knows, it might give us another platform to add down the road.

as far as the plattform goes Amazon AWS is the only provider offering something like this (basically a VPS) for free, at least for one year.
I am in no way affiliated with amazon so I don't want this to sound like promotional material but it could make a nice plattform to put amahi on.
Currently 15GBIN/15GBOUT with 10GB hdd space is too little for my main use of amahi (media server) but someone could find it interesting to installa amahi directly on there and maybe even buy some resources, basically no modification should be needed to put amahi on top of an already existing image of a fedora system on the cloud, i figure it would be enough to add the amahi repository on the existing cloud fedora image, install amahi base package and start the installer as usual, can this be all done via ssh?

I did found a simpler way to do what I needed without having to install amahi directly there so I won't do that except for testing, this is more like playing for me, trying to find new things that could be done, but I'm sure there are more use of amahi on aws for other people out there (Small Office?), people may post them here I guess.

I realize that my previous idea of finding a way to use the 10GB sort of like an intelligent cache requires to write a big piece of code from zero and it's not really worth the investment as there are really few situation in which it would be needed.

I'll add the trick to bypass a provider ISP with amazon AWS as a how-to or in the wiki once i test it completely and can write nice step by step instructions.

[bigfoot65]

Awesome and thanks for the kind words. I took a brief look at the free subscription and looks promising.

I may try it out. I may wait until you have something in the wiki. I just don't have the time to play with it at the moment.

[smccloud]

Still debating if I want to use Amahi/Greyhole instead of Server 2008 R2/FlexRAID (and since I can't RDP into my server right now something on it is FUBAR). Ran across this and signed up for Amazon AWS to get the free micro for a year. Anyone know how long it takes for an AWS EC2 account to be usable? Been around an hour for me and I still can't.