Jason Kester's questions

I have a nightly job on Windows Server 2003 that automatically updates itself by downloading its .exe from Amazon S3. I've noticed that when it performs the download and tries to run the newly downloaded .exe, it is immediately kicked back to the command line without actually running anything.

I can verify this by sticking the new version of the code directly on the server and watching it execute successfully, then uploading it to the "update" server, running the bootstrapper then running the .exe and observing it fail to execute.

I can only assume that this is due to Windows protecting me from running code from outside its trusted zone. How does a fella go about configuring it to allow code from this particular external location to execute?

Thanks!

I have an old Thinkpad X60 that I'd like to wipe clean and rebuild. Seeing as this machine doesn't have an optical drive, what's the easiest way of installing Windows XP?

I have an external USB hard drive available. Would it be possible to run the install from that instead? Otherwise, what options do I have?

Edit: assuming we're using a USB mass storage device...

Is there a BIOS setting that I would need to change, or will it configure itself automatically? Would the USB drive need to be configured in any special manner, or would simply having a copy of the Windows CD files in a directory there be sufficient?

Since the first couple answers that came in were basically "yes", I guess I didn't phrase my question correctly. I'm asking for detailed instructions on how to do this, not just a sanity check that I'm headed in the right direction. Thanks!

I have a few EC2 Linux images that do nightly processing jobs for one of my projects. From time to time, I'll need to get in, make some code changes, configure some things, and re-bundle the image.

My toolset for these operations is painfully sparse (SSH into the box, edit files in VIM, WGET remote files that I need), and I suspect there is a much better way to do it. I'm curious to hear what other people in my position are doing.

• Are you using some form of Windowing system and remote-desktop equivalent to access the box, or is it all command line? Managing EC2 Windows boxes is trivial, since you can simply remote desktop in and transfer files over the network. Is there an equivalent to this in the Linux world?

• Are you doing your config changes/script tweaks directly on the machine? Or do you have something set up on your local box to edit these files remotely? Or are you simply editing them remotely then transferring them at each save?

• How are you moving files back and forth between EC2 and your local environment? FTP? Some sort of Mapped Drive via VPN?

I'd really need to get some best practices in place for administering these boxes. Any suggestions to remove some of the pain would be most welcome!

EDIT: Evidently, I wasn't clear above, since the first two responses revolved around managing and configuring EC2 Instances. I just want to know how to remote desktop into a running Linux Server so that moving files around and editing them is less painful.

I have a batch file that I'd like to run on startup of an EC2 Windows AMI. The program I'd like to run from that batch file takes the instance-id of the EC2 machine as a parameter. What is the simplest way to get that Instance ID passed as an argument to that program?

From Amazon's Documentation on the subject, I see that you're supposed to issue a WGET to a specified URL and parse the response. So an alternate way of phrasing this question might be "How do I pass the contents of a HTTP request to a program as an argument in a Windows batch file"

In pseudocode, this is what I'd like to do:

set ID = GET http://169.254.169.254/2008-08-08/meta-data/instance-id
myprogram.exe /instanceID=%ID%

Any suggestions on how I might proceed?