There are many ways to create a new AMI for use with Amazon EC2, the best solution is to simulate EC2 with a local Xen install, however this sometimes isn’t possible, so the next best thing is to create a VirtualBox based VM, then generate an EC2 AMI from it . Preparing the Virtual Machine The main special requirement …

Recently I’ve been experimenting with the Amazon Free Tier micro instances (one is running this blog). After running an instance for a few days I noticed that the clock seems to drift quite heavily ( more than 10 minutes over 24 hours ). The most obvious fix to any clock drift is to install and configure ntp – however …