Abtin Forouzandeh's questions

I'm curious if anyone out there has figured out how to launch an Amazon EC2 instance with just a ramdrive. I am looking at a scenario where I do not need/want any instance storage (all my data is stored as s3 objects). All I want is to launch a micro instance to perform computation.

Perhaps I need to create a tiny AMI - one that can fit in a ramdisk carved out of the instance's 613mb of ram. Creating the AMI is straightforward, but I don't know what commands will load that AMI into ram. And to my eye, nothing in the ec2-run-instances documentation looks relevant.

Running the command

sudo rsync -a -e ssh /home/blah user@server:/home/blah

rsync seems to be renaming directories (not sure if it is renaming files). For example, "M.I.A." is being converted to "MPTBTC~C". This also happens when copying over samba.

The target file system is ext4.

Update: This appears to only happen with directories that end with a period. A google search indicates this should only be a problem under windows, but I am syncing from linux (ext3) -> linux (ext4).

I am building a site that I anticipate will have high usage. Currently, my registrar (GoDaddy) is handling DNS. However, Amazon's Route 53 looks interesting. They promise high speed and offer globally distributed DNS servers and a programmable interface. While GoDaddy doesn't offer a programmable interface, I assume their servers are geographically distributed as well.

What are the main reasons I should opt to use Amazon Route 53 over free registrar-based DNS?

I've downloaded the Amazon Ubuntu EC2 AMI images (from http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04/release/) and I am trying to run it locally on my linux desktop. Is it possible to run the AMI using VirtualBox? Is some other virtualization software required?

What are the advantages of checking the "Enable IO APIC" option in VirtualBox?

While I can't find any information on advantages when I google it, two disadvantages are clear. First, it can break older Windows VMs if it is disabled after installation. Second, it reduces VM performance. Yet, I noticed that it is enabled by default when installing Ubuntu 64bit.