I managed to not notice that my blog had gone down after the EC2 outage earlier this year. So when I popped back on one day to find it wasn’t there any more I was a little concerned.

Popped over to PuTTY, opened up my EC2 connection to be presented with a login screen. So I tried the old usual login: “root”

Ok, let’s  try that then:

BRILLIANT!!

Uh..

Now what?

Crap. I can’t remember.

I faffed around for ages with “ls”, checking out what’s in “/opt/” and “/etc/” and getting a bit lost. How do I restart the damned web server?! Which web server did I install? Why do I not remember how to use linux?! ARGH!!

Oh, hey. Look – I just tapped “PgUp” and saw this:

Hello. That’s a command to see what ports are open, as far as I remember. That’s the first command from 2bitcoder‘s EC2 WordPress tutorial.

Pressing the down key resulted in listing every command I’d ever entered:

login as: ec2-user
Authenticating with public key "imported-openssh-key"
Last login: Thu Sep  8 20:27:22 2011 from blah--blah-blah-blah.blah.blah.com

       __|  __|_  )  Amazon Linux AMI
       _|  (     /     Beta
      ___|\___|___|

See /etc/image-release-notes for latest release notes. :-)
[ec2-user@ip-12-345-67-890 ~]$ apt-get install lighttpd
[ec2-user@ip-12-345-67-890 ~]$ ipkg install lighttpd
[ec2-user@ip-12-345-67-890 ~]$ yum install lighttpd
[ec2-user@ip-12-345-67-890 ~]$ sudo yum -y install lighttpd
[ec2-user@ip-12-345-67-890 ~]$ ls
[ec2-user@ip-12-345-67-890 ~]$ ls /
[ec2-user@ip-12-345-67-890 ~]$ ls /opt/
[ec2-user@ip-12-345-67-890 ~]$ ls /etc/
[ec2-user@ip-12-345-67-890 ~]$ ls /etc/httpd/
[ec2-user@ip-12-345-67-890 ~]$ ls /etc/httpd/run/
[ec2-user@ip-12-345-67-890 ~]$ sudo ls /etc/httpd/run/
[ec2-user@ip-12-345-67-890 ~]$ service httpd start
[ec2-user@ip-12-345-67-890 ~]$ httpd start
[ec2-user@ip-12-345-67-890 ~]$ sudo /etc/init.d/httpd start

I just had to hit “enter” a couple of times to replay some ancient commands to restart Apache and mysql and the site was back up and running! Phew!

So – if you’re using EC2 for hosting something and you can’t remember the very basic linux commands you fired off to get it working in the first place, fear not! PgUp is your friend!