Testing Netsus in Amazon Cloud

[myronjoffe]

Hi,

We want to test NetSUS in EC2. Has anyone imported OVA files in EC2 before or has done something similar with running the appliance in the cloud?

[monogrant]

Sounds like a great idea. Also interested.

[jarednichols]

How would you secure it?

[rockpapergoat]

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?

[jarednichols]

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

[jarednichols]

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

[rockpapergoat]

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.

[jarednichols]

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

[rockpapergoat]

ha… do it in the name of science.

[myronjoffe]

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

[jarednichols]

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

[myronjoffe]

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

[rockpapergoat]

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

[myronjoffe]

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

[rockpapergoat]

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.