Tag Archives: WinSCP

EC2 WinSCP /var/www file upload

Since I use an Amazon EC2 Microinstance to host this blog and I noticed I had no favicon appearing (which is a bad thing) I thought I might as well make one and pop it up.

I took my usual avatar (Jiraya, the “Pervy Sage” from Naruto) and just let someone else do the hard work for me, uploading it to FavICO.com instead of even bothering to download an app to do it.

Then I opened up WinSCP and used my EC2 ppk to authenticate with my EC2 instance, took that favicon.ico file and tried to upload it to /var/www/html (the default website root if you install wordpress) only to receive the error:

ec2 var www upload permission error

Hmmm.

If you check the permissions on that folder (“stat /var/www” via SSH) you’ll see that it’s owned by the “root” group; since you’re logging on as ec2-user you’re not a member of that group.

Your options, according to the internet, appear to be;

The solution I found was much easier.

  • Upload the favicon to the ec2-user home directory via WinSCP
  • Move (mv) the favicon from the ec2-user directory to /var/www via SSH using “sudo” to get the necessary permissions

Easy.

Scripting the setup of a developer PC, Part 1 of 4 – Installing Applications & Utilities with Ninite

Setting up a development PC can be a bit of a pain, unless you’re smart and create an image following the setup of a brand new vanilla install. But who’s organised enough to do that?! I’ll get onto that option in another post, but this one is more an excuse to play with interesting stuff.

I thought I’d have a play with coding up a set of scripts to do as much of this setup as possible instead; there are a few tools out there to do this sort of thing, and I’ve gone with ninite, webpi, and chocolatey.

 

I’ll start with the intended ideal option for each tool, and then go into how this doesn’t work perfectly and why, and what the other options are. Part 1 of this series of 4 is for the easiest tool of all:

 

Installing Applications & Utilities: ninite

This site allows you to create a single exe installer which contains your own selection of a large number of applications/frameworks/utilities:

232111_autoinstall_ninite_web

For an ASP.Net developer PC I’ve gone with Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Skype, VLC, Flash, Air, Java, Silverlight, Launchy, 7-Zip, WinSCP, PuTTY, Notepad++, WinMerge, Paint.NET, PDFCreator, Reader, DropBox, and Everything Search for my installer. This installer can be called from the command line but the basic version still opens a graphical interface; however no interaction is required. The Pro version comes with a command line installer, but I’ll not be using that.

Ninite Pro is absolutely awesome: you can remotely manage installed software and software patches within your network with a silent install process.

232111_autoinstall_ninite_pro

 

So far my install script set looks like this; pretty bare:

[batch]@echo off
REM Ninite stuff
cmd /C Z:\Installation\SetupDevPC\Ninite_DevPC_Utils.exe[/batch]

And the installation directory is merely one script and one exe:

281211_autoinstall_ninite_dir_contents

That was dead simple! Lovely! Coming up next – something a bit messier:

Scripting the setup of a developer PC, Part 2 of 4 – Installing Frameworks and Components with WebPI.