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."

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. Latest AMI Version: v4.0.5. The system is set to automatically update to the latest version as part of the nightly maintenance.

Region Location AMI
USA
us-east-1 N. Virginia ami-04987868a85a426e0
us-east-2 Ohio ami-05f86677ca210d933
us-west-1 N. California ami-0d068cde7aab5718b
us-west-2 Oregon ami-0932798bfd1bb8e6c
Africa
af-south-1 Cape Town ami-001a3d2a55e1ae369
Asia Pacific
ap-east-1 Hong Kong ami-045ebab565b76569b
ap-south-1 Mumbai ami-0a9bb21631b3e02ab
ap-south-2 Hyderabad ami-0a776185d04a2d0ef
ap-southeast-1 Singapore ami-0038f92346157eb79
ap-southeast-2 Sydney ami-011f72c9dd5122f53
ap-southeast-3 Jakarta ami-0df04b7b1609b90f7
ap-southeast-4 Melbourne ami-01b2206e5bbd52d01
ap-northeast-1 Tokyo ami-029446043cb44a51b
ap-northeast-2 Seoul ami-0cb65566495dabdf9
ap-northeast-3 Osaka ami-0b34e1caf69875125
Canada
ca-central-1 Canada ami-064d7221ddcb5fa1a
ca-central-1 Calgary ami-09302499763382cea
Europe
eu-central-1 Frankfurt ami-013ab940c2c941b82
eu-central-2 Zurich ami-0a897a7aa705a65c9
eu-west-1 Ireland ami-03689c1db39af98d5
eu-west-2 London ami-09e1528cce0fae8d5
eu-west-3 Paris ami-0d04800bba382f03d
eu-north-1 Stockholm ami-0c7988b36ed23064e
eu-south-1 Milan ami-0a9f4129fa074b207
eu-south-2 Spain ami-057366e85db406ce8
Middle East
me-south-1 Bahrain ami-003fd8df2ef4769b6
me-central-1 UAE ami-0da3404d1e8d54613
Israel
sa-east-1 Tel Aviv ami-0cc2c6aee3c2345ac
South America
sa-east-1 Sao Paulo ami-0a648c8df6b7faca3

With the Instance Type, a t3.micro (or t3a.micro) instance is fine for testing. With a t3.micro you won't have access to AV scanning. For production a t3.small is fine to start with and you may want to move to a t3.medium if you have more than about 20 users (depending on usage).

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

If you later want to increase the disk space, you can shut down the instance, go to the Volumes and select to modify your Volume. When you reboot the LiquidFile system it will automatically resize the filesystem to use all available disk space.

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.

This is the old style AWS config, but it shows the information you need better.

At this point the LiquidFiles system is booting (after you've hit Launch Instance) and you can continue that part in the Getting Started section.

Next Steps — Static IP, DNS & Reverse DNS

For production systems, it's a good idea if we can to configure Static IP addresses as that make DNS configuration easier and more reliable.

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 13.56.7.180.

Configure Reverse DNS

Once the DNS is configured, you can configure the Reverse DNS in the AWS console. There is a validation that the DNS configured matches the Reverse DNS you want to configure so you'll need to make sure your DNS is configured properly first.

Above we configured files.liquidftest.com mapped to 13.56.7.180, here we're configuring 13.56.7.180 mapping to files.liquidftest.com.

Please continue on the Getting Started page.