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Preparation

You’ll need to take a few minutes in advance and prepare the laptop you’ll be bringing to the hands-on workshop.

For the day of the workshop, you will be provided with powerful virtual machines from Amazon Web Services with essentially all the special software installed, and so you’ll need a means to communicate with your Amazon Web Services computer instance via SSH. For users of Windows operating systems, this means that you will need make sure you have installed the program PuTTY. (You can get PuTTY here.) All other operating systems are usually capable out of the box using SSH in a program called Terminal.

A special key file is part of the way you’ll identify yourself to the computer instance when you connect via SSH.

To help make the first few minutes of the workshop session go smoothly, complete these steps to prepare your system and yourself for connecting to Amazon Web Services.

  1. Two key files will be provided by email. Download the two key files to the computer you will bring the day of the workshop.
  2. Move both of the files to your Desktop. OPTIONAL: You’ll actually only need one of these files. If you’d like, you can prepare for the workshop by identifying the appropriate key file you’ll need for your system and deleting the one you will not need. Those with Windows operating systems, will need the workshop.ppk file; all others will need the workshop.pem file.
  3. Before lab meeting take a few minutes to identify and review the login instructions specific to your computer in order to get familiar with the process of logging into Amazon Web Services with SSH on your operating system. The guides to connecting for each type of computer follow this page. You will not yet have the addresses of the virtual machines, and so you will not be able to complete the steps until the day of the workshop. For Windows users, make sure you have installed the program PuTTY.

Be sure you have a modern, updated browser on your system. Preferably Chrome or Firefox.