So here’s a short shell script to spin up an instance, wait 30 seconds, then connect:

If you’re reading this through an RSS reader, you can see the script over at github.

Obviously you’ll need to change the parameters at the top of the script to suit your needs. But since this was a bit of a pain in the donkey hole for me to figure out, I thought I would share.

If you want to help out, I’d love you to enlighten me on how to have the script figure out if an instance has finished booting so I could eliminate the sleep step.

So I was looking for more simple/elegant solutions. After thinking the Boto library for Python might be helpful, I realized that the easiest way to use that would be with rJython which meant having to interact with R, Python, AND Java. Considering I don’t program in Python or Java, that seemed like a fair bit of complexity. Then I realized that the canonical implementation of the AWS API was the AWS Java SDK. The rJava package makes interacting with Java from R a viable option.

Since I’ve never written a single line of Java code in my pathetic life, this was somewhat harder than it could have been. But with some help from Romain Francois I was able to cobble together “something that works.” The code below gives a simple example of interfacing with S3. The example will look to see if a given bucket exists on S3, if not it will create the bucket. Then it will upload a single file from your PC into that bucket. You will have to download the SDK, unzip it in the location of your choice, and then change the script to reflect your configuration.

If you are running R in Ubuntu, you should install rJava using apt-get instead of using install.packages() from inside of R:

sudo apt-get install r-cran-rjava

Here’s the codez. And a direct link for you guys reading this through an RSS reader:

I realize that Duncan Temple Lang has created the RAmazonS3 package which can easily do what the above code sample does. The advantage of using rJava and the AWS Java SDK is the ability to apply the same approach to ALL the AWS services. And since Amazon maintains the SDK this guarantees that future AWS services and features will be supported as well.

ssh -i ~/MyPersonalKey.pem -D 9999 root@ec2-184-73-41-72.compute-1.amazonaws.com

the -i switch tells ssh to use my RSA identity file stored in ~/MyPersonalKey.pem

the machine name (ec2-184-73-41-72.compute-1.amazonaws.com) I get from the AWS Management Console

the -D is the magic. -D opens an dynamic port forwarding tunnel between my Linux box and the EC2 machine. This is, for all intent and purposes, an encrypted SOCKS4 proxy on port 9999 of localhost. Then I just have to change my proxy settings in Firefox to use use a SOCKS host.

Now that’s all pretty easy. And I like easy. But it’s not easy ENOUGH. You see, I’m lazy. I’m not just lazy in the “I’ll do it mañana” sort of way, but in the “I’m too damn lazy to click my mouse 5 times” way.

So I want this easier. Well, I can make the proxy settings in Firefox easier through the use of the Quick Proxy extension for Firefox. That’s a good start. It turns on and off the proxy with a single mouse click. But I still have to go into the AWS management web site, fire up a machine then log in via SSH. Let’s make that part easier!

While it’s not simple to install and configure, the EC2 command line tools are going to be required in order to make a script that fires up EC2 and then connects to the instance with ssh. I struggled getting the tools to run until I found this tutorial.

Your file locations and names may be different than the tutorial. Change appropriately. I followed the tutorial instructions but I created a key named ec2ApiTools which will come in handy later.

After you get the EC2 tool up and running and you can do something like list the available AMIs without an error you can stop with the tutorial. I’ve been doing a lot of shell scripting lately so I said to myself, “Self, let’s script the ssh connection in R!” For the record, I always end my impredicative in an explanation point which I verbally pronounce as, “BANG!” As a result, when I talk to myself it sounds like two 10 year old boys playing cops and robbers. Anyhow, I did script it with R using Rscript. Because I’m a man who listens to myself.

And since you were kind enough to slog through my channeling the drunken ghost of James Joyce, here’s my script:

If you’re reading this in an RSS reader of for some other reason don’t see an R script above, here’s your link.

The only two EC2 API commands I use in the script are  ec2-run-instances which starts the instance and ec2-describe-instances which gives me a list of running instances and their details.The rest of the script is simply parsing the output and figuring out which instances was started last.

I’ve now set up a launcher panel item that starts the script. Then when I see the xterm window come up I click the little red button in the lower right corner of my browser which switches on the Firefox proxy. Then I’m safe to surf Soldier of Fortune Magazine without the interference of my corp firewall.