<html><head></head><body><div class="gmail_quote">Nick Sheppard <nshep@attglobal.net> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre class="k9mail">Hi all,<br /><br />I set up an AWS EC2 cloud Tor relay a month ago and made an expensive <br />mistake. Perhaps others may learn from my example!<br /><br />I followed the instructions on the tor-project website, and found that <br />it actually is quite a simple process, as it says. I did notice that <br />the AWS setup screens I was seeing were different from the screenshots <br />on the website, but they were asking me similar questions so I just went <br />with the defaults where the website said "No changes". I didn't look <br />closely enough.<br /><br />Everything went to plan and I watched the relay work for a month. <br />However, on the AWS EC2 Management console I neglected to click on <br />"Services" then "Billing" to see how much they were charging me.<br /><br />At the end of the month I got a bill for 120 dollars. And Amazon were <br />quite right - they were charging me for the 1024 GB of storage I had <br />accidentally asked for by no
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changing the default when I set up the <br />instance. The first 30 GB were free, the other 994 I was paying for. <br />And I was only actually using 1.5 GB ...<br /><br />There doesn't seem to be any way of shrinking the storage of an existing <br />instance (though it can be expanded, now, with EBS, Elastic Block <br />Storage), so I had to terminate it (which deletes the storage) and <br />create another instance with a more reasonable 10 GB (of which df tells <br />me I'm now using 11%).<br /><br />So ... if you've recently set up an AWS EC2 cloud relay with the Tor <br />AMI, check your storage, and your billing!<br /><br />I think the option to specify your storage amount (with its default of <br />1024 GB) may have been introduced when AWS introduce EBS instead of just <br />instance-backed storage (which may have defaulted to the size of the AMI??).<br /><br />In any case, I think the tor-project website AWS screenshots urgently <br />need to be changed to reflect th
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current setup procedure, with a <br />warning not to accept the 1024 GB default and an explicit recommendation <br />about the amount of storage to ask for (was my guess of 10 GB reasonable?).<br /><br />Oh well, I have gained 100 dollars worth of wisdom from the episode. My <br />way of "Don't look too closely, and hope for the best at the end of the <br />month" was *not* a good idea.<br /><br />Nick Sheppard<br /><hr /><br />tor-relays mailing list<br />tor-relays@lists.torproject.org<br /><a href="https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays">https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays</a><br /><br /></pre></blockquote></div><br clear="all">Thanks for sharing this. I, too, followed the guide on <a href="http://torproject.org">torproject.org</a>; however, at the last page where you review and create the instance there was a warning notifying me that my setup wasn't eligible for the free deal. No matter what I altered, I couldn&#
39;t
get the free offer. So, I decided against creating the instance. I'll have to have another look. I also noticed the images on <a href="http://torproject.org">torproject.org</a> were outdated. It would be good to have that addressed.<br>
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