[Starcluster] Problems solved...

[Mark J. Pearrow]

Hi all,

After much hair pulling, I figured out the issues with not being able to log into instances that I had created with starcluster as well as my problems with creating images of modified AMIs. 

1) Somehow my "default" security group in EC2 was configured so that only one host could ssh to my instances - and of course, that host wasn't the one I was launching starcluster from. Once I made the correct ssh-allow entries via ElasticFox, starcluster would successfully return and allow me to log in to my instance.

2) You not only have to set the EC2_CERT and EC2_PRIVATE_KEY environment variables, you must also set AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, and AWS_USER_ID.

3) You also need not just create-image.py but all the other scripts like sshtunnel.py, etc. Maybe a tar.gz with all those utils would be a good thing to have on the download page?

The create_image.py script does indeed create whatever storage bucket you call it on the command line (via the -b option). I found the image in the EC2 Web Console under Images --> AMIs

mjp