mailinabox/ec2

Deploying to EC2

Amazon's EC2 isn't a great place to host a mail server. For one, you don't know if you'll get an IP address with a bad reputation from its previous owner. Also, setting reverse DNS requires a special request. But EC2 makes deployment easy, so it may at least be useful for testing.

Instructions

Sign up for Amazon Web Services.

Create an Access Key at https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?#security_credential. Download the key and save the information somewhere secure.

Set up your environment and paste in the two parts of your access key that you just downloaded:

sudo apt-get install ec2-api-tools

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY=your_access_key_id
export AWS_SECRET_KEY=your_secret_key
export EC2_URL=ec2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
export AWS_AZ=us-east-1a

Here we're using the Ubuntu 13.04 amd64 instance-store-backed AMI in the us-east region. You can select another at http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/.

Generate a new "keypair" (if you don't have one) that will let you SSH into your machine after you start it:

ec2addkey mykey > mykey.pem
chmod go-rw mykey.pem

Then launch a new instance. We're creating a m1.small instance --- it's the smallest instance that can use an instance-store-backed AMI. So charges will start to apply.

source ec2/start_instance.sh

It will wait until the instance is available.

You'll probably want to associate it with an Elastic IP. If you do, you'll need to update the INSTANCE_IP variable.

Log into the server:

ssh -i mykey.pem ubuntu@$INSTANCE_IP

Then follow the instructions in the main README.

If you were just testing and are ready to destroy your instance (and all data), run:

ec2-terminate-instances $INSTANCE