Using Amazon's Elastic Cloud EC2 and Rsync to back up data files

[James Kramer]

> Each EC2 instance is getting a new server key. Perhaps you could
> create a server key for it and configure your startup script to replace
> the new server key with the one you created, so each instance would
> end up using the same server key.
>
>
Before you create an instance, you generate a key pair using the command
ec2-add-keypair gsg-keypair
This returns the RSA key pair which you cut n paste into a file called
id_rsa-gsg-keypair.
You then reference this file when you create the instance so the
proper key is embedded in the instance.

>> Another concern that I have is that the 'known-hosts' file which
>> stores the host fingerprints will become increasingly large with each
>> run of the script.
>
>
> You could use a dynamic DNS service so each instance will be
> accessible via a single DNS name.
>
When you generate the Amazon Host is creates the DNS host name.  I
guess that you can somehow alias the name using dynamic DNS.  I have
used dynamic DNS only once before but I was planning to start using it
again because I currently switched to FIOS with a dynamic IP.

What is neat about EC2 is that I can customize the instance and add
anything that I need and then save it as a new instance.  EC2 is
really neat.  It is fairly expensive though so I need to operated it
and terminate the instance when I don't need it.