Babble On

The following will generate a dummy 500 MB file named ‘outputdata’ in no time whatsoever:

dd if=/dev/zero of=outputdata bs=500M count=1

Until Amazon release a Fedora 9 AMI for EC2, you have three choices as far as getting a Fedora 9 instance goes:

1. Build yourself one from scratch
2. Fine one that somebody else has built and made available to the public
3. Upgrade one of the existing Amazon Fedora 8 images

Maybe building an AMI from scratch is a bit more effort than you were hoping to expend today? And perhaps using an untrusted 3rd party AMI will leave you feeling a little uneasy about your security?

Assuming you trust Amazon to some extent (and if you don’t, perhaps EC2 isn’t your best bet), how do you go about upgrading a Fedora 8 image?

Thankfully, the answer is fairly simple. First, boot a suitable Fedora 8 image, then follow the instructions kindly provided by Carson McDonald on ioncannon.net - which, incidentally, is an invaluable resource for Fedora upgrades of all kinds. Before you know it, you’ll be up-and-running with Fedora 9 on EC2!

Update: the above works fine with a 32-bit AMI. If working with a 64-bit AMI, you’ll need to run the following before using rpm to install the new release:

rpm -e --nodeps curl.x86_64 curl.i386

Ready? It’s:

:> filename

(i.e. colon greater-than followed by the name of the file). This can also be used to create a new, empty file.