LiquidFiles Documentation
LiquidFiles Documentation

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."

images/install/aws_console_1.png

In the Community AMI area, please search for "liquidfiles" and the LiquidFiles Virtual Appliance instance will be ready to be selected.

images/install/aws_console_2.png

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.

One of the more resource intensive processes in LiquidFiles is Antivirus Scanning. If you start LiquidFiles with less than 1.5GB of RAM, AV scanning will be disabled on default to save memory.
images/install/aws_console_3.png images/install/aws_console_4.png

The default disk size is 20GB. You can increase this as much as you need for your requirements.

images/install/aws_console_5.png

Give the LiquidFiles instance a descriptive name so that you can find it in the list of your EC2 appliances.

images/install/aws_console_6.png

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.
images/install/aws_console_7.png images/install/aws_console_8.png

Final review and confirmation that you have access to the SSH key for administration.

images/install/aws_console_9.png

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.

Please note that this is only required if you're planning to use LiquidFiles in production. If you're just testing out the product, there's no need to complete these steps.

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

images/install/aws_elastic_ip_1.png

After we've allocated our Elastic IP, we need to associate it with our LiquidFiles instance.

images/install/aws_elastic_ip_2.png images/install/aws_elastic_ip_3.png

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.

images/install/aws_elastic_ip_4.png

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.

images/install/aws_elastic_ip_5.png

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 Form

Suggested 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:

images/install/aws_elastic_ip_6.png

Once you hit Submit, the Amazon AWS team will respond within one business day.

Please continue on the Getting Started page.