Amazon EC2 Installation
In the Amazon Elastic Cloud, it's possible to launch a pre-configured LiquidFiles Virtual Appliance. Amazon has several data centres across the globe. LiquidFiles has pre-configured virtual appliances in all of Amazon's EC2 data centres.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Configuration
For any Amazon EC2 instance to operate, you will need to configure Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in the Amazon AWS space. If you're starting a complete fresh Amazon environment and LiquidFiles is your first instance, please follow these instructions to Configuration Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
Installation
This is a step by step instruction for setting up LiquidFiles in the Amazon EC2 cloud.
First, login or create an account at the Amazon EC2 console.
First, select the region where you want to Launch the LiquidFiles instance. Select Instances in the left hand menu and click "Launch Instance."
In the Community AMI area, please search for "liquidfiles" and the LiquidFiles Virtual Appliance instance will be ready to be selected.
Regions
Here is the complete list of different EC2 regions and respective AMI's.
| Region | Location | AMI |
|---|---|---|
| USA | ||
| us-east-1 | N. Virginia | ami-03c9cad9140bc83f1 |
| us-east-2 | Ohio | ami-0401f4f23163e1a76 |
| us-west-1 | N. California | ami-08c5726b91d8b0404 |
| us-west-2 | Oregon | ami-0c249d1860f9c7dce |
| Africa | ||
| af-south-1 | Cape Town | ami-0e85b0d59f7e35f1a |
| Asia Pacific | ||
| ap-east-1 | Hong Kong | ami-00ddaf9ede8f6174b |
| ap-south-1 | Mumbai | ami-0eef1c01b2fc85138 |
| ap-south-2 | Hyderabad | ami-0f0688123dff2d211 |
| ap-southeast-1 | Singapore | ami-0ae3246e86296c1eb |
| ap-southeast-2 | Sydney | ami-0835ecbb9a8766522 |
| ap-southeast-3 | Jakarta | ami-086bfac408ec67bab |
| ap-southeast-4 | Melbourne | ami-025e01732dac2589f |
| ap-northeast-1 | Tokyo | ami-0e96c7ac3c3341419 |
| ap-northeast-2 | Seoul | ami-09c3d4279619c6e05 |
| ap-northeast-3 | Osaka | ami-045ae756be425732b |
| Canada | ||
| ca-central-1 | Canada | ami-0c42936553b1095f3 |
| Europe | ||
| eu-central-1 | Frankfurt | ami-0a5b2feb7236ab496 |
| eu-central-2 | Zurich | ami-0a105a9f139fa3f88 |
| eu-west-1 | Ireland | ami-077320df5c347914c |
| eu-west-2 | London | ami-045d9a4462e38c9a4 |
| eu-west-3 | Paris | ami-063a4a6e3a7f0cbfa |
| eu-north-1 | Stockholm | ami-05216fb4faf571189 |
| eu-south-1 | Milan | ami-0a5ea7d02d5758210 |
| eu-south-2 | Spain | ami-05cfb45c2a5f8cf44 |
| Middle East | ||
| me-south-1 | Bahrain | ami-014f551448d4f34a6 |
| me-central-1 | UAE | ami-021c9f6b2f66fb982 |
| South America | ||
| sa-east-1 | Sao Paulo | ami-048527340ad48df24 |
The next step is to Select Instance Type. A t2.micro instance is fine for testing. You will most likely select a t2.small instance (or larger) for production systems.
The default disk size is 20GB. You can increase this as much as you need for your requirements.
Give the LiquidFiles instance a descriptive name so that you can find it in the list of your EC2 appliances.
The following Security Group is a complete list of ports if you enable all features in LiquidFiles. A couple of notes:
- The four ICMP rules at the top of the list are strictly not needed for operation but are generally considered safe and will improve stability, operation and troubleshooting.
- 192.1.2.0/26 in the TCP/222 port section should be replaced with your own external admin network.
- Please see the: System & Firewall configuration for more details on the required ports.
Final review and confirmation that you have access to the SSH key for administration.
Next Steps / Reverse DNS & Email Setup
There is a builtin anti-spam protection mechanism with Amazon EC2 — all EC2 instances are blacklisted on default, and have an email rate limiter. This is to stop spammers from spinning up hundreds of EC2 instances and instantly start spamming people.
This means that we either need to relay our emails using the Email Relay Configuration or we need to apply to Amazon to remove our LiquidFiles instance from the blacklist and rate limiter before we can use LiquidFiles in EC2 in production.
To remove our LiquidFiles instance from the Amazon blacklist/rate limiter we need to:
- Configure a fixed IP address for the instance & called Elastic IP in Amazon AWS language.
- Configure our DNS server to man a Fully Qualified Domain Named (FQDN) to the static IP address (i.e. liquidfiles.company.com maps to 50.2.3.4).
- Send the request to Amazon.
Configure Fixed IP / Elastic IP
Please login to the AWS management console and go to EC2 → Elastic IP
After we've allocated our Elastic IP, we need to associate it with our LiquidFiles instance.
When the Elastic IP has been successfully associated with our LiquidFiles instance, we can copy the address and use that for our DNS server configuration.
Depending on your DNS Server/Service, the configuration is going to be a little bit different, and somewhere you will have the ability to add a name with an A record that has the value from the Amazon Elastic IP address we just allocated ourselves.
In our example, we use the name: liquidfiles.liquidftest.com that is mapped to 35.156.226.193.
Request Reverse DNS/blacklist removal
The final step is to request that the Amazon AWS team adds a reverse DNS name and remove the Email Sending limitations by filling out this form:
Amazon AWS Request to Remove Email Sending Limitations FormSuggested Use Case Description:
We use a LiquidFiles Virtual Appliance to send and large files to and from our customers and partners. The LiquidFiles virtual appliance sends email notifications to recipients. Can you please add a reverse DNS record and remove the Email Sending Limitations for the following ip address. Thank you.
The complete form will look something like this:
Once you hit Submit, the Amazon AWS team will respond within one business day.
Please continue on the Getting Started page.