Getting started¶
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.
- Two key files will be provided by email. Download the two key files to the computer you will bring the day of the workshop.
- 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 theworkshop.pem
file. - 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.