Galaxy Cloudman - Can'T Get An Instance Started / The Connection Has Timed Out

Question

[Applet]

Hi Everyone,

I'm trying to set up Cloud man.

I believe I followed the instructions listed here to a T:

After launching the instance I even waited 5 minutes before trying to access the public DNS e.g,. ec2-xxx-xx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com/cloud but my browser just says:

The connection has timed out

The server at ec2-xxx-xx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com is taking too long to respond.

Any ideas what I should check? I'm stuck. What information would be useful?

Info:

Zone is us-east-1a 
Type is m1.large
AMI Name: galaxy-cloudman-2011-03-22 
Region is US East (Virginia)

I used this format for user data:

cluster_name: <DESIRED CLUSTER NAME>
password: <DESIRED Galaxy CloudMan WEB UI PASSWORD>
access_key: <YOUR AWS ACCESS KEY>
secret_key: <YOUR AWS SECRET KEY>

Update:

I looks like the previous time I hadn't clicked "apply custom rules" I re-rentered the rules and was sure to save them. Then I followed the remaining instructions.

So now when I go to the public DNS it get prompted with a request for a user name and password. I leave the user name blank and enter the password from my user data but it won't let me in.

Any ideas on that?

[Brad Chapman]

The error message indicates you can't connect to the instance, which is normally an issue with ports being blocked. Can you check your CloudMan security group: Is http access enabled? Did you choose this security group for the instance?

[Applet]

Ok, weird, when I click on the security group it doesn't show any of the rules I made! I wonder if I forget to click save somewhere :-( I'll report back after I re-add the rules.

[Applet]

Hi Brad, I posted an update, let me know if you have any ideas.

[Brad Chapman]

Can you double check the password you input into the user-data is identical? You just want password: your_pass without any surrounding characters, and then use your_pass, with no username in the web interface. If you are still having issues you might try BioCloudCentral, which automates all the steps and provides a working user-data file you can download: http://biocloudcentral.org

[Applet]

Thanks again for the help. The password should be identical, I copied and pasted it from the user data. Could having a space between "password:" and the actual password be a problem?

[Applet]

I tried biocloudcentral.org but it says "Amazon connection problem: A problem starting EC2 instance. Check AWS console. "

It did create a new keypair and security group though. Where is the AWS console?

[Applet]

Ok, I tried a new password and it let me in. Maybe it doesn't like all numeric passwords? BTW it does seem to require the space between "password:" and the password.

[Applet]

Thanks again for the help. I'll post an answer and close the question. BTW I asked on the mailing list about my issue with biocloudcentral.

Answer 1

[Applet]

See comment thread above for details.

For the connection timed out issue, I had simply forgotten to save my security rules after adding them.

For the password issue, it apparantly doesn't like all numeric passwords (or at least the one I was using.) After I changed it to four charactors, all lowercase letters it worked fine.