How to access your EC2 linux instance filesystem over ssh using nemo on linux mint using private key?

I assume that following are available:

1. You have a working EC2 linux instance setup
2. You are running linux mint (Actually I use mint)
3. You have access to your private EC2 key (.pem file)

Steps

1. Place your .pem file in ~/.ssh folder and rename it to id_rsa
2. Run following command ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa (This will load the key in ssh-agent)
3. Use the command in sftp://@ in the address bar of nemo.

This will show all the folders on the remote machine. You can choose to add it to favorites...

Cheers!!!

Wordpress on AWS for company intranet

A while ago I was asked by my CIO, if we can replace our existing custom built intranet with something better that is available off the shelf.

I initially thought of showing off Drupal/Joomla/Wordpress and give a comparison along with the recommended platform. I thought of setting up the infrastructure on one of the test machines that I had which was running linux. Unfortunately it did not have apache, php and other required packages. Installation of these packages using apt-get was a challenge due to restrictive information security policies that would not allow download of files from the repositories. Also the organizational proxy  did not play well with linux making it a nightmare to get anything done (CNTLM did work for a while). Overcoming these would have been a bureaucratic ordeal.

After some thought I decided to use AWS. Picked up a pre-built bitnami AMI from AWS marketplace and set it up on a spot EC2 micro instance.

It took a couple of days for one of our guys to put the content from our existing intranet on wordpress and find a good looking theme.

The demo to CIO went very well  and we got the implementation green signal for Wordpress.

Since AWS EC2 instance was running on my personal account I got a bill of 3.82 USD later on for this exercise. A small price to pay for a successful demo with little effort and avoid organizational bureaucracy.

I have started loving the power of cloud and AWS.