[cs615asa] Question about HW5

[Jan Schaumann]

Pengfei Zhang <pzhang11 at stevens.edu> wrote:
 
> When we create a temp instance, we need a key pair name and  security group
> name. Should we hardcode it or read it from config file?

As per the previous discussions around this on this list: you do not
need to specify a key pair or a security group either in your code nor
in a configuration file.  AWS will fall back to default values if you do
not specify these -- it is up to the user of your tool to either have
default values that work for them, or to specify the right options via
the environment variables specified in the manual page.

So:

- no options specified, ec2-backup will not provide any hardcoded
  options and just use whatever aws defaults to:

  ec2-backup .

- the user wishes to use the security group 'foo' and the keypair named
  'bar'

  export EC2_BACKUP_FLAGS_AWS="--security-groups foo --key-name bar'
  ec2-backup .

- the user wishes to use the default security group and the keypair
  'foo', and she needs to tell ssh(1) that the private key is found in
  ~/.ssh/privkey:

  export EC2_BACKUP_FLAGS_AWS="--key-name foo"
  export EC2_BACKUP_FLAGS_SSH="-i ~/.ssh/privkey"
  ec2-backup .

I hope this clarifies this issue.

-Jan