Introduction

This little script builds an Archlinux [AWS EC2] (http://aws.amazon.com/fr/ec2/) image on an EBS Volume.

Pre-requisites

First you need to build the linux-ec2 and ec2arch packages. linux-ec2 is a modified version of the stock Archlinux linux kernel with the required modifications to run on EC2. ec2arch is a small script to be run at instance startup to setup the instance.

Instructions

• Copy the compiled packages to ./repo

• Build the local repository database:

  repo-add ec2.db.tar.gz .pkg.

• Make a 15 GB EBS volume and attach it to the instance. It will be known to the instance as /dev/xvd?

• Run makearchec2.sh specifying the device

  ./makearchec2.sh /dev/xvd?

• Make a snapshot of your finished EBS volume

• Register your AMI

Example on i386 and region eu-west-1:

ec2-register --region eu-west-1 --architecture i386 --kernel aki-47eec433 --root-device-name /dev/sda --snapshot snap-xxxx --name Archlinux-i386-3.0-20111221 

aki-47eec433 is the kernel image name for the architecture and the region of the image. This PDF contains the names of all the kernels images depending on architecture and location.

TODO

This script is meant to be run on EC2. However, it can easily be adapted to produce a S3 based AMI.

The changes to be done are:

• Modify the disk layout of the image to adapt it to an S3 based AMI
• Add the commands to bundle the image and upload it to S3