What tools do you use to upload files to amazon ec2 Linux instances?

Question

I am using the standard fedora AMI with the LAMP stack bundled and I want to upload files onto the server from my Windows desktop.

What is the "normal" approach for this? I am not a UNIX admin by any stretch, although I am more than comfortable with FTP and the basics of a BASH shell.

As far as I can see there is no FTP server installed by default on the remote virtual machine, and I am unable to open one up at my end because of firewall restrictions. I looked at WinSCP, but before I go to the lengths of installing and configuring that I wondered what the expected means of doing this might be. In any case I don't see how WinSCP or any other FTP based tool can work without the target machine listening, which implies something like and FTP server.

Is there anything like a Windows remote desktop connection?

I could mount an S3 elastic storage volume from within EC2, but it is a bit of a sledgehammer to crack my little nut of just wanting 100k of files copied up to the server.

This is a different question to getting my web application running on the virtual server to save files locally, which is what the other SO questions in a similar vein seem to be asking.

Any ideas welcome.

Answer 1

I use putty's psftp, which uses ssh. If you can ssh into the box, then psftp should work.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

You will first need to convert your pem private key to a ppk using puttygen for psftp to use the keyfile for authentication because it only uses ppk format and not pem format, as far as I know.

Answer 2

If you prefer a graphical tool, have a look at the S3Fox Firefox plugin (my choice), or peruse this list of standalone graphical S3 browsers.

Answer 3

"In any case I don't see how WinSCP or any other FTP based tool..."

SCP (and SFTP, for that matter) is an entirely different protocol from FTP. Data is transferred over an SSH channel. If you have SSH access to your virtual machine, SCP/SFTP should work.

Answer 4

For S3 I use Cyberduck (on Mac) and S3Fox. For mass uploads (in scripts) I use s3sync. I manage EC2 Instances with ElasticFox and original ec2 Tools from Amazon.

Answer 5

You've made the right choice with WinSCP. SCP is based on SSH, not FTP, and SSH and SCP are standard on Linux servers. So, WinSCP takes a bit of configuration bit its the simplest. Your alternative would be to install and maintain and FTP server - a lot more work there! There are equivalents to Remote Desktop but they're way more complicated to setup.

If you're having trouble with configuring your SCP program with your key but you have the ability to "shell" in, you could create a new linux user on the server with a password, then you can use that password instead of the key in WinSCP which is easier.