Questions[amazon-rds](server)

I have created my RDS instance before creating my Elastic Beanstalk environment. The two are working together with no problem, but I'd like them to be linked together, and have the RDS parameters accessible via the RDS_* environment variables.

The Elastic Beanstalk configuration page says:

Although the first link creates a RDS instance in-place and links it to the current environment, the second link just redirects to this documentation page., which unfortunately only explains how to create a new RDS instance, but not how to link an existing one.

How can I associate an existing RDS instance to my Elastic Beanstalk environment?

How do I create a local backup of a remote Amazon RDS MySQL database? What I need to know is how to make a complete full local backup of a MySQL database (not a remote Amazon snapshot) that can be used to restore to a new database anywhere, on any MySQL server (same version of course).

NOTE: I know how to import data from a flat file via MySQL. Here is how I connect:

mysql -h mydb.xxxxx.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com -u myuser -P 3306 -p

Here is how I load a single database table:

mysql> LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE 'C:/Temp/t1.tab' INTO TABLE t1 LINES TERMINATED BY '\r\n';

Resetting the RDS master user's password is simple enough, but how do you find your master users username?

So, I just created the Amazon RDS account. And I started an instance of database.

The "endpoint" is:
abcw3n-prod.cbmbuiv8aakk.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com

Great! Now I try to connect to it from one of my other EC2 instances.

mysql -uUSER -pPASS -habcw3n-prod.cbmbuiv8aakk.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com

But nothing works and it just hangs.

I tried to ping it, and nothing works either. Nothing happens.

Do I need to change some settings?

Amazon RDS has a metric for 'freeable memory'. It appears to go up & down in a sawtooth pattern.

This leads me to believe that it's memory that is being used by MySQL for caching and that when the cache expires, more freeable memory appears. Any definitive documentation would be great.