OPS345 Lab 1

https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/ click "AWS Account", then "AWS Edicate Starter Account", then "AWS Console"

AWS cost monitoring

• Students are responsible for their AWS usage, including paying for it
• No AWS alerts on AWS educate account
• For those not using AWS educate: Amazon CloudWatch billing alarms
• Always keep cost in the back of your mind when doing /anything/ on AWS

Basic security on a public-facing server

• A good AWS password, not used anywhere else
• Remove default usernames
• Whenever possible: don't use passwords at all, use SSH keys for logging in
• root is never allowed to log in remotely
• How to use sudo and how to configure it
• ssh keys, same as OPS245
• How to organise your SSH keys and not lose them

AWS networking

• Default dynamic public IP
• Default static private network/IP
• Reserving a static public IP under "Elastic IPs", cost of doing that

First AWS VM

• Deploy a pre-built SuSE VM ("Instance") suse-sles-15-sp2-v20201211-hvm-ssd-x86_64
  • Instance type t2.micro - sort of almost free
• Differences between SuSE and CentOS
• Explore the VM:
  • connect with user ec2-user, ssh key
  • no yum, use zypper
  • systemctl
  • passwd, shadow, group files
  • netstat -atnup
  • Create senecaid-admin user, no password, add to wheel group, modify /etc/sudoers
  • Confirm can log in as senecaid-user and successfully sudo su
  • Delete ec2-user