Having an ssh term into an instance isn’t the easiest thing to work with. I was hoping to get an X11 window into the session and display it back to my desktop. My desktop is a WindowsXP so the only real option is to use TightVNC to get an X11 interface.
Fortunately the Oracle Unbreakable Linux that I am running as an instance has vncserver installed as a default module. I tried running vncserver on the instance and attaching to it from my desktop. Unfortunately, it did not work.
To connect to the vncserver, I first tried to use putty to tunnel the ports. VNC runs on ports 5900 and 5901. I tried to configure the proxy to have it tunnel through ssh and connect on the other end. Fortunately, this did not work. I have done this in the past and it is very slow and difficult to use.
My second attempt was to create a new port opening in the Elasticfox tool and connect directly with TightVNC. I defined the ports 5900 and 5901 as the default connection and mapped it to the security group used to start the instance. This worked and allowed me to connect to the VNC server running on the test instance.
Doing this, we can now launch firefox and view web sites. The ones that we want to look at are https://localhost:1158/em and http://localhost:8080/apex. With this configuration we can now start looking at installing, testing, and experimenting with instances. We can also use the Amazon storage to keep our tests persistent so that we don’t have to recreate the environment every time.
more later…..