jamesyonan/brenda

Trying to create a custom Brenda AMI with Blender 2.78c

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sundriftproductions commented

I've been able to run Win-Brenda using the existing recommended AMIs. Now I'm trying to set up my own AMI with the newest version of Blender (2.78c) and I think I'm missing something.

Long story short: when I run an instance of the custom AMI via Win-Brenda, nothing gets rendered. I don't know how to view what's going on in my particular AMI because I get nothing from the "Tail log from instances" feature. The AMI is shown to be running in the AWS console -- I think I don't have something set up correctly.

Here are the steps I take to create my AMI:

  1. Go to the EC2 console and click on launch instance. On the left you will see AMI options. Quickstart is highlighted by default. Click on Community AMIs. From the checkboxes on the left, choose Ubuntu, 64-bit, and EBS. Enter "Yakkety Yak" for the search term. ("Yakkety Yak" is the code name for Ubuntu 16.10.) Pick an AMI with Virtualization type: HVM (not paravirtual). I picked this image: "ubuntu/images-testing/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-yakkety-daily-amd64-server-20170716 - ami-01212b17"

  2. Choose an Instance Type: I picked "c3.large"

  3. Configure Instance Details: I left all the defaults. FYI -- Shutdown Behavior is set to "Stop".

  4. Add Storage: Leave all the defaults (8 GB for the root).

  5. Add Tags: I left the default options.

  6. Configure Security Groups: For now, I'm going with the defaults:

    • Assign a Security Group: Create a NEW security group
    • Type: SSH, Source: Anywhere

  7. Select an existing key pair or create a new key pair: I chose an existing key pair that I know that works.

  8. If you created a new key in step 7, generate the proper key here: http://blog.powercram.com/2009/07/connecting-to-aws-ec2-instance-linux.html

  9. After you launch the PuTTY command line, you'll see the command line say "login as:". Put in "ubuntu" (sans quotes).

  10. Now run this:
    sudo perl -p -i.bak -e 's/^disable_root: 1/disable_root: 0/' /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg
    sudo perl -p -i.bak -e 's/.*ssh-rsa/ssh-rsa/' /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
    sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:irie/blender
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt install blender
    sudo apt-get install -y blender python-pip gcc python-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev git unzip
    sudo apt-get install python-pip
    sudo pip install -U boto
    sudo pip install -U s3cmd
    sudo apt-get install git
    sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install python-dev -y
    sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev

  11. Next, download and install Brenda:
    git clone http://github.com/jamesyonan/brenda.git
    cd brenda
    sudo python setup.py install

  12. At this point, you still don't have the latest version of Blender. To do that...
    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thomas-schiex/blender
    sudo apt update
    sudo apt install blender

  13. To check which version of Blender you have installed:
    blender -v

I've used Linux a bit, but I do not consider myself an expert. Any ideas on things that I can check to make sure that this image runs correctly?

sundriftproductions commented

Never mind -- I got it working. I found a detailed set of instructions here: https://github.com/robksawyer/brenda-web/wiki/How-to-Create-an-Amazon-Machine-Image-(AMI)