Testing Netsus in Amazon Cloud

Sounds like a great idea. Also interested.

How would you secure it?

i'd argue that apple updates are not very sensitive in the first place. secure the ec2 instance however you normally would, but what else do you need beyond that?

I meant more the netboot portion. I'd actually sort of be shocked if that worked anyway.

The NetSUS disk is a vmdk, which is supported by EC2 to import.

well, i hope nobody actually wants to netboot from an ec2 instance. for sus, it's fine, though you'll probably pay a ton for bandwidth and storage.

Hey, just because it's not a great idea doesn't mean you shouldn't do it... Right???

ha… do it in the name of science.

Its more of a proof of concept. Will secure it by only allowing our internal ip ranges to connect to it.

I need help importing the appliance. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/vmimport/

There are 2 ways it can be done:

1.) Amazon EC2 VM Import Connector for VMware vCenter. Im unable to do it that way as I dont have access to our vCenter.

Option 2.) VM Import Command Line Tools from Amazon EC2 API tools. Seems very complicated. Anyone out there done this?

Or had a thought..

option 3.) If I spin up an ubuntu server and run the below command would that work?

install auto=true priority=critical url=http://cloud.github.com/downloads/jamf/NetSUS/NetSUS-1.01.seed

I'd try option 3 first. What JAMF does to Ubuntu to turn it into the NetSUS is pretty low key (while awesome).

I've tried running the following command - install auto=true priority=critical url=http://cloud.github.com/downloads/jamf/NetSUS/NetSUS-1.01.seed
on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS but get an error any ideas?:
external image link

you can't just run that line. the file in question is for use in the preseed environment, as part of an initial install.

read this: https://help.ubuntu.com/11.04/installation-guide/i386/appendix-preseed.html

Thanks for the info rockpapergoat. Do you know if I'll be able to run that command in EC2 though?

you still wouldn't run it manually. you'd have to include it as preseed info in a fresh install of your ubuntu instance. with ec2, you're spinning up basic preconfigured images.

i started working on a puppet module to do all the nets us config awhile ago. this is a better approach, as you can take an existing image and bring it into the desired state quickly.