Liron Harel's questions

What IP I need o put in the IP Address and Domain Restriction in order to allow Windows PowerShell to be able to run Invoke-WebRequest to a URL for a site that is hosted on the same machine.

I am doing it for testing scheduled tasks. As for now, my IIS is configured to allow access only to my IP. I tried adding 127.0.0.1, the local machine IPv4 address and the Default Gateway, but I still get Forbidden: Access is Denied response.

What IP I need to use in the IP Address and Domain Restrictions in order to give PowerShell access to loading my site which is hosted on the same machine.

My wordpress EC2 server was probably hacked. When running iftop command I can see that my server sends and recieves data from a hostname name "i157panamamails.com".

This hostname never goes away and eating lots of bandwidth. I want to prevent the server from communicating with this hostname and deny it completely. I tried putting a deny from in the .htaccess and restart the Apache2 server (using Ubuntu 10.0), but it didn't help, I an still see that hostname connection active. Maybe the connection is not from Apache2, but from what I know this is the only server installed.

How can I prevent the server to deny this hostname?

More info:

• in etc/hosts I have only 127.0.0.1

• in etc/resolve.conf I have:

  nameserver [some_ip_address] <--- this IP is for EC2, so not problem here

  domain ec2.internal

  search ec2.internal

• The IP in the resolve.conf doesn't resolve to host name

• Using lsof command on port 22/21/80 Can't find the host name in the connections. Port 21 has one connection for root user listening, but port 21 is not open in EC2 security groups and port 443 (HTTPS) has no connections

• It seems that the connection is not on port 80 of apache because lsof shows only my connection at a specific time frame and I see the connection for that hostname still active in the network print. I assume that another software that acts as a server might initialize that connection on an already open port 80 that is not related to Apache

• Running NetHogs on eth0 shows me that a program sshd: ubuntu@pts1 under user ubuntu which is continuously receiving and sending data (not Apache2). Looks suspicious

• I also notice a lot of connection (~50) from a PROGRAM 37:80-[ip_addresses] on port 80 and other ports. Those PROGRAM(s) do not send or receive data (most of them)

• Blocking the hostname in the host.deny didn't help

Update: I've find out the IP and blocked it in IPtables (both OUTPUT and INPUT). The IP server doesn't send data to that IP, but it dos receives a 240 bytes every second or so.

I am planning to use m1.small in Elastic Beanstalk for the image processing of my app. It can scale behind a load balancer and provide more processing power when the app needs to based on specific metrics.

I also considered using m3.medium which is more optimized for compute intensive application like image processing. The problem is that my application runs on ASP.NET 4.5 and when running on Windows 2012, I assume that the m3.medium 4GB SSD drive won't work for this type of instance.

The other option is m1.medium that has 160GB of storage space but less powerful than the m3.

Which server considering that I need to run my application on Windows and I am running it behind a load balancer (Elastic Beanstalk) and can add remove servers using auto scale, which one do you recommend for image processing?

I am interested in working with Amazon Elastic Beanstalk to deploy my new site. A few things that I need to know and can't get an answer to:

1) How can I maintain IIS settings of all deployed and future deployed machines? 2) If I can maintain, what happens if I change the settings on one server, will it automatically set it on other servers? 3) How can I backup the data. In other servers I usually make an AMI and deploy to a new server in case of a problem?

I am having some debating around scaling Amazon EC2 instances. I have developed my app using ASP.NET, so I have to choose to go with a Windows EC2 instance. MySQL and images are served from other instanced, so the scaling goes (for now) only for the web application instance.

My options (for now):

1. Small 64bit instances - Start with a Small instance 32bit, create an Elastic Load Balancer, add more small instanced on demand when traffic rises (depends on the CloudWatch specs that I setup).
2. Medium High-CPU instances - Start with a Medium High-CPU instance (costs more, but more powerful), create an Elastic Load Balancer, and add more Medium High-CPI instances when needed.

The first option is cheaper, and allows the application to scale gradually, compared to the Medium instance, The Medium instance only works with 32bit, so I am kind of locked to the 32bit. I don't want to scale up, as I prefer to scale horizontally. That means that when the traffic is low, I won't pay the high price of the Medium instance. So with the second option I can choose to go with a 64bit small instance, and scale horizontally by adding more servers under the Elastic Load Balancer automatically depends on the specs gotten from Amazon CloudWatch (ie. CPU, RAM, etc.).

My problem is that I have problem to decide which one to go for. I've read that the Medium High-CPU instance is 5x more powerful than the Small one. But the price is a bit to aggressive to start with. In general, I prefer paying less and scale when needed by adding more small instanced.

I need your help in choosing which way to go. What the advantages of each approach? Why it's better to get the Medium high-CPU compared to small in terms of horizontal scaling, if there is an advantage. After all, the all idea around a cloud architecture is to be able to save costs on servers that you don't need their computing power in a given time frame.

I did the best to optimize the instance by using caching for both the page and SQL queries to MySQL (that exists on Xeround, which solved the problem of scaling when it comes to DB). My DB is relatively small (1000 rows with not so much data), so the 1.7GB of ram on the small instance is ok for my caching needs. I think that the main issue will be on the CPU when traffic rises. Furthermore, the storage is also very small, hosting just my website ASPX pages.

I assume that the application can attract ten thousands of visitors each day, maybe more. So scaling is a must - BUT will a small instance horizontal scaling is a smart move? - Will it be smarter choice for even high traffic web applications?

Right now I am more towards the small instance + Elastic Load Balancer solution. It seems logical to pay less and pay more as the application grows.

Waiting for your knowledgeable answers. Thanks.

I want to block everyone from accessing my website but me. I am using IIS7 and have IPv4 Address and domain Restrictions installed.

How do I assign the ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) to my domain. Do I need to do it for the main domain (ie. domain.com) or sub domain (www.domain.com). My registrar is godaddy - how I do it? - What's the most recommended way?

I also later want to redirect traffic from non-www to www (301 redirect via IIS) or vice versa and I need it to work.

I want to temporarily block port 80 for the outside world, but want the load balancer to pass through the firewall (via security group) so it won't see the instance as unhealthy. How can I do that?

Update: I also want to know how can I allow only myself accessing to the elastic load balancer via port 80 (but prevent others access). I know that the load balancer doesn't have specific security groups that I can setup and tell it to only accept my IP address, but is there any other way to do it?

I need your help about scalability on Amazon EC2 instanced. I have developed a web application using asp.net. I have decided that for start, I want to deploy it on a Medium High-CPU Windows Server 2008 instance.

I have problem understanding what is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and what is CloudWatch Autoscaling and what each one does?

My target: I want that when CPU utilization exceeds some kind of a limit, I want that Amazon will automatically create a duplicated instance (EC2 + EBS) from the current server and divide the visits between those two servers. When the stress is low, I want Amazon to terminate those instanced that were created in order to give more computing power when the application needs it.

Other then that, I want to know that if I choose to go with High CPU medium instance, what are my upgrading options. I use EC2 + EBS and I thought it would be easy to duplicate the EBS (create a snapshot), launch a new instance (more powerful one), attach the EBS and assign the elastic IP to the new server. Of course I don't know how it all adds up when Amazon scales the servers and when I can apply it.

The most important thing is that my application won't crash if many users visits my website, that's the most important part.

I really need your help on this. Many thanks.

I have been experiencing a problem yesterday. My site is in Hebrew language. MY site is built on Wordpress. The problem is related to escaped encoded posts URL only. IF the post URL has escaped encode in uppercase it works, if in lowercase, it returns 404. I want both to pass without a problem. I am hosting my site on godaddy shared hosting. Is there any option to let both uppercase and lowercase be accepted and show the same post?

For example: http://domain.com/%d7%9e%d7%a6%d7%9c%d7%9e%d7%95%d7%aa/ (this is what my site have)

Google crawled it as: http://domain.com/%D7%9E%D7%a6%D7%9C%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%AA/ (this returned 404)

I think that in the mod_rewrite (htaccess) I should make the URL transfered to wordpress as a non-case sensitive. How can I do that?