SharkD wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Yes, you can. Indeed, if I understand it, you can set up for-fee machine
>> images, where the customer pays you some number of cents per hour for
>> the privilege of using your machine image. And that number can, of
>> course, be zero.
> 
> Forgive me if I'm way off the mark since, as you noted, I am inexperienced in
> network adminning--but couldn't you simply limit the customers to non-admin
> accounts, and thereby save your protected files? I guess a dedicated hacker
> could get around this, though...

I'm sorry - I don't know what you're asking. Unless what you meant to 
quote was where I was talking about my passwords.

The easy way to set up an "image" that you can boot on an Amazon EC2 
machine is you boot one of their images, log in, make the changes you 
want (like install POV-Ray, configure it to run your render farm 
software when it boots, etc), then run a program that takes a snapshot 
of the machine and sticks it into a bootable file. The problem is that 
program winds up needing your secret Amazon passwords in order to store 
the file in a place you can boot it. So it's possible your password, 
which costs you money to use, winds up in (for example) the "Recent 
Documents" area, or the swap sector, or the command history, or 
something like that.  If you don't know where and when all that magic 
gets stored, it's difficult to make sure that the image you created 
doesn't have something like that in there.

Not *too* difficult, but I'd need to take a fair amount of time to make 
sure it all worked before I'd release it to someone else. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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