LiquidFiles Documentation
LiquidFiles Documentation

Amazon EC2 Installation

In the Amazon Elastic Cloud, it's possible to launch a pre-configured LiquidFiles Virtual Appliance. Amazon has several data centres across the globe. LiquidFiles has pre-configured virtual appliances in all of Amazon's EC2 data centres.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Configuration

For any Amazon EC2 instance to operate, you will need to configure Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in the Amazon AWS space. If you're starting a complete fresh Amazon environment and LiquidFiles is your first instance, please follow these instructions to Configuration Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Installation

This is a step by step instruction for setting up LiquidFiles in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

First, login or create an account at the Amazon EC2 console.

First, select the region where you want to Launch the LiquidFiles instance. Select Instances in the left hand menu and click "Launch Instance."

In the Community AMI area, please search for "liquidfiles" and the LiquidFiles Virtual Appliance instance will be ready to be selected.

Regions

Here is the complete list of different EC2 regions and respective AMI's. Latest AMI Version: v4.1.6. The system is set to automatically update to the latest version as part of the nightly maintenance.

Region Location AMI
USA
us-east-1 N. Virginia ami-04436c6487c27c5d4
us-east-2 Ohio ami-06760072f015d5ba5
us-west-1 N. California ami-06e83c22a0d0780e5
us-west-2 Oregon ami-055534e12c8855bda
Africa
af-south-1 Cape Town ami-08341374686b089e5
Asia Pacific
ap-east-1 Hong Kong ami-0df27aff023d0e229
ap-south-1 Mumbai ami-045bea41aea8ce418
ap-south-2 Hyderabad ami-026f11d0cf5249642
ap-southeast-1 Singapore ami-071af298e1ac97a45
ap-southeast-2 Sydney ami-0d18b4a68a0c40c4d
ap-southeast-3 Jakarta ami-0e7126ee5758ead24
ap-southeast-4 Melbourne ami-05ecb7e7d49f8fa73
ap-northeast-1 Tokyo ami-05c1403d4a4f07111
ap-northeast-2 Seoul ami-0f22db1aa1afac828
ap-northeast-3 Osaka ami-08f6519acf947adf6
Canada
ca-central-1 Canada ami-08dfb9e21cc2156c9
ca-central-1 Calgary ami-0d6844527c4b7024b
Europe
eu-central-1 Frankfurt ami-0e56d556a67cfe020
eu-central-2 Zurich ami-0ecbe558bcc4213c7
eu-west-1 Ireland ami-0250e6fd5a872ea46
eu-west-2 London ami-0e2b8fc3eae8aff5e
eu-west-3 Paris ami-0d391b6fc6adf5f92
eu-north-1 Stockholm ami-06e73edd2ee9c3cde
eu-south-1 Milan ami-073551a3b2f7d33f8
eu-south-2 Spain ami-0c6d86c5a0b979af9
Middle East
me-south-1 Bahrain ami-0bff089e5568b2850
me-central-1 UAE ami-0164a0bf903f5da6a
Israel
sa-east-1 Tel Aviv ami-0a310279eb3a51a5a
South America
sa-east-1 Sao Paulo ami-020e91931708a68d1

With the Instance Type, a t3.micro (or t3a.micro) instance is fine for testing. With a t3.micro you won't have access to AV scanning. For production a t3.small is fine to start with and you may want to move to a t3.medium if you have more than about 20 users (depending on usage).

The default disk size is 20GB. You can increase this as much as you need for your requirements.

If you later want to increase the disk space, you can shut down the instance, go to the Volumes and select to modify your Volume. When you reboot the LiquidFile system it will automatically resize the filesystem to use all available disk space.

The following Security Group is a complete list of ports if you enable all features in LiquidFiles. A couple of notes:

  • The four ICMP rules at the top of the list are strictly not needed for operation but are generally considered safe and will improve stability, operation and troubleshooting.
  • 192.1.2.0/26 in the TCP/222 port section should be replaced with your own external admin network.
  • Please see the: System & Firewall configuration for more details on the required ports.

This is the old style AWS config, but it shows the information you need better.

At this point the LiquidFiles system is booting (after you've hit Launch Instance) and you can continue that part in the Getting Started section.

Next Steps — Static IP, DNS & Reverse DNS

For production systems, it's a good idea if we can to configure Static IP addresses as that make DNS configuration easier and more reliable.

Configure Fixed IP / Elastic IP

Please login to the AWS management console and go to EC2 → Elastic IP

After we've allocated our Elastic IP, we need to associate it with our LiquidFiles instance.

When the Elastic IP has been successfully associated with our LiquidFiles instance, we can copy the address and use that for our DNS server configuration.

Depending on your DNS Server/Service, the configuration is going to be a little bit different, and somewhere you will have the ability to add a name with an A record that has the value from the Amazon Elastic IP address we just allocated ourselves.

In our example, we use the name: liquidfiles.liquidftest.com that is mapped to 13.56.7.180.

Configure Reverse DNS

Once the DNS is configured, you can configure the Reverse DNS in the AWS console. There is a validation that the DNS configured matches the Reverse DNS you want to configure so you'll need to make sure your DNS is configured properly first.

Above we configured files.liquidftest.com mapped to 13.56.7.180, here we're configuring 13.56.7.180 mapping to files.liquidftest.com.

Please continue on the Getting Started page.