[StarCluster] issues creating a new AMI from a starcluster AMI

[Neal Parikh]

Hi,

I'm attempting to follow the instructions at http://web.mit.edu/stardev/cluster/docs/create_new_ami.html and ran into some warnings. I basically just want an AMI like one of the starcluster ones, only with some extra software installed. I'm using starcluster 0.91.2, the latest stable version.

I did the following (some output omitted to keep this easier to read):

(1) $ sc listpublic
>>> Listing all public StarCluster images...

64bit Images:
--------------
[0] ami-12b6477b us-east-1 starcluster-base-centos-5.4-x86_64-ebs-hvm-gpu-rc2
[1] ami-0af31963 us-east-1 starcluster-base-ubuntu-10.04-x86_64-rc1
[2] ami-a19e71c8 us-east-1 starcluster-base-ubuntu-9.04-x86_64
[3] ami-2941ad40 us-east-1 starcluster-base-ubuntu-9.10-x86_64-rc3
[4] ami-a5c42dcc us-east-1 starcluster-base-ubuntu-9.10-x86_64-rc4

I selected [1], a 64-bit AMI based on Ubuntu 10.04.

(2) I went to the AWS management console and launched an instance based on this AMI. This is confirmed here:

$ ec2-describe-instances | grep INSTANCE
INSTANCE	i-49ea6025	ami-0af31963    <omitted>

or

$ starcluster listinstances
id: i-49ea6025
zone: us-east-1c
ami: ami-0af31963
groups: @sc-masters
<some info omitted>

(3) I ran starcluster createimage to package an S3-backed AMI and got some warnings:

$ starcluster createimage i-49ea6025 nparikh-sc nparikh-amis
StarCluster - (http://web.mit.edu/starcluster)
Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (STAR)
Please submit bug reports to starcluster at mit.edu

cli.py:506 - WARNING - Instance i-49ea6025 is a StarCluster instance

cli.py:510 - WARNING - Creating an image from a StarCluster instance can lead to problems when attempting to use the resulting image with StarCluster later on

cli.py:517 - WARNING - The recommended way to re-image a StarCluster AMI is to launch a single instance using either ElasticFox, the EC2 command line tools, or the AWS management console. Then login to the instance, modify it, and use this command to create a new AMI from it.

Continue anyway (y/n)?

----------------

So I'm pretty sure I followed all the instructions correctly and still got these warnings. Is this anything to be concerned about? Everything else in starcluster seems to work great so far, so I thought I would check into this. Thanks very much for your work on this package.

- Neal