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I am trying to use a Public Dataset with the snapshot id of snap-­e1608d88. I am looking at these instructions, but they do not seem to help.

The first suggestion there says I should click on Volumes and create a new volume, set it's size and availability zone, as well as specifying the snapshot id. The problem is, snapshot id is a dropdown, not a text field, and there are over 100 options in the dropdown.

Next I installed the ec2 command line tools and tried to run the ec2-create-volume command. For my first attempt I tried ec2-create-volume --snapshot snap-­e1608d88 --availability-zone us-east-1 but that gave output indicating I need to provide a certificate with the --cert switch. Which certficate exactly? I tried my SSH cert at ~/.ssh/id_rsa. No dice. I got the following Java error: "org.codehaus.xfire.fault.XFireFault: General security error;"

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  • I'm not sure why they would provide a dropdown for the snapshot id, it's just bad UI design IMO.
    – Randy L
    Mar 25, 2012 at 16:42
  • While I will concede that it isn't the best design, it shouldn't be more than a minor inconvenience. In most programs, the 'dropdown' list will select the first item that starts with the characters you type when it is selected (tested with Firefox and Chrome - but should work elsewhere). Click the dropdown for snapshot, and type 'snap-e16' and the correct entry will be highlighted (note you have to type it without pauses).
    – cyberx86
    Mar 25, 2012 at 17:32

2 Answers 2

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I don't understand your confusion about specifying the snapshot ID via the web interface; the instructions don't say "type in" the ID, it merely says "Configure the following settings" -- and yes, the pulldown can contain a lot of entries.

For the certificate on the command line, it's not your SSH key it wants, it's your AWS certificate, which you can find out all about at http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSSecurityCredentials/1.0/AboutAWSCredentials.html#X509Credentials

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In order to get past this security error, I have created a X.509 certificate on my AWS account. I copied the new certificate to my server and passed the command line argument my new certificate, still no luck. Finally, I have uploaded the private key which was generated at the same time as creating the X.509 cert. I passed this on to the command line using the --private-key switch, and I am no longer getting a security error. But another error, this one complaining about the snapshot id that I am using.

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