Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> You're allowed to have special characters in object names?

Define "special".  Sure, I think you can have most any unicode character you 
want in a name. There might be a handful you can't, but slash isn't one of 
them. Indeed, slash is in *most* of the names, because the tools that deal 
with heirarchical names assumes that.

> But also the interface that allows me, the blog owner, to add new 
> blog entries without logging into the virtual server over SSH and 
> manually editing half a dozen HTML pages. (And, ideally, convert my 
> custom markup into valid HTML.)

That's what offline processing is for. :-)  Make the changes locally, run 
your script that turns them into valid HTML, and post any changes up to S3. 
Run the CGI script on your own machine at home and do the same. (Doesn't the 
URL for posts let you specify something to go as a mailto without human 
interaction? It's been so long since I had to worry about not actually 
having a server running.....)

>> Certainly renting is more expensive in the long run than buying. But 
>> that's why it's the *elastic* compute cloud, you see.
> 
> Uh... no, I don't really see.

It's elastic because you can rent more machines when you need to go faster 
and fewer when you need to go slower. It's just problematic for you that you 
can't rent less than one machine at a time. :-)

> Unless you mean that ranting 20 quad-core virtual machines for a day is 
> cheaper than *buying* a renderfarm?

Exactly.

> Right. Because sending an email is way easier than scripting VirtualDub. 
> Oh, wait - no it isn't. :-P

Sure it is, if you have things configured properly.

mail -s "your render is done" me### [at] examplecom </dev/null

Admittedly, getting the mail to come out at your ISP without the firewall 
etc getting in the way is tricky sometimes.  Spam has made most ISPs really 
lock down their servers.

Or create a page you can look at on the web server running on the EC2 
instance to see how far along you are. :)

>> I've been running one for a company for something like 2 years.
> Running what? An EC2 instance?

Yes.

> Perhaps you can answer a small question for me then: It seems simple 
> enough how a random dude like me can sign up and start using AWS. But 
> what if you're trying to use it for commercial purposes? How does giving 
> multiple administrators control over the system work?

The same as if its your own machine.  You create multiple logins, give each 
a different SSH key, and let people log in that way.

When you start up the machine, you give it the public key for root to log in 
with. From there on, it's completely your machine. If you get the one 
running Windows, I imagine you can get it to join your domain, for example.

> Of course, you get charged money for performing backups. ;-)

No, but you get charged money for holding on to backups. Data from EC2 to S3 
is free, last I looked.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Why is there a chainsaw in DOOM?
   There aren't any trees on Mars.

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