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I am spawning a few test servers on ec2 that happen to be m1.larges. I am using these test servers for load balancin testing. Anyways, most of the servers I have used before have been backed by EBS, but these instances (ubuntu 11.04) obviously come with a lot of ephemeral space located @ /mnt.

What I noticed that is happening is I am running on space on the root disk. I am trying out this tutorial

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/using-instance-storage

moving my /home + /usr directories to /mnt and then remounting them. This works except it does not survive a reboot. Am I missing something here or is this tutorial not completely correct.

How do I make space on my / drive so I can do stuff and survive re-boots.

Joseph Misiti
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2 Answers2

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The tutorial is correct, according to the official Amazon EC2 docs at http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/InstanceStorage.html. So you should not be losing this data. How exactly are you rebooting these instances? Are you sure you are losing the data on the instance storage device and not just the pointers? And what is your /etc/fstab file like?

You may want to read http://alestic.com/2012/01/ec2-ebs-boot-recommended which recommends that you always use EBS volumes, though.

Daan
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  • those article are interesting but they confuse me - as far as i know, its not possible to "boot to EBS" from a custom image. you need to boot on to an instance and than attach your EBS ... or am i missing something – Joseph Misiti Mar 24 '12 at 21:30
  • I'm not sure what you mean by "booting to EBS"? You can certainly create EBS-backed custom images (or AMIs in the AWS parlance): http://webkist.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/creating-an-amazon-ec2-ebs-ami-from-a-running-instance/ – Daan Mar 25 '12 at 10:56
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Ephemeral storage should persist across instance reboots (i.e. running reboot or similar within the instance, or issuing a RebootInstances API request). Is a script in your AMI possibly formatting the ephemeral storage at startup?

mgorven
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  • where would that script exist, i just created an AMI from one of these images http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/natty/current/ – Joseph Misiti Mar 24 '12 at 21:29
  • Somewhere in `/etc/init.d`, `/etc/init` or `/etc/rc.local`. I doubt that an official Ubuntu image would have that behaivour though. – mgorven Mar 25 '12 at 18:04