Automatically Login & Startup A Windows Program On Amazon's EC2 Service

Question

How can I automatically start a program on Amazon's EC2 Windows 2008 web servers?

For example, if I wanted to test the "Digg effect" on a web page of mine, how could I open 100 windows 2008 servers at once, each loading one (or two?) instances of the firefox web browser?

I have placed a sample batch file in the windows startup folder that echos the time it was called, but it is only started when I actually login remotely via the remote desktop protocol.

I don't want to have to login to 100 servers to get my software to run :P What can I do?

I am using this Windows 2008 Datacenter, Amazon-supplied AMI specifically: ami-a2698bcb

Answer 1

How can I automatically start a program on Amazon's EC2 Windows 2008 web servers?

Just run it as a service. Follow this tutorial:

http://www.hosting.com/support/vps/windows/service/

M

Answer 2

On Linux use wget instead of firefox and write a small script like this:

#!/bin/bash
# Script name: myscript.sh
case $1 in
start)
   for ((i=0; i<=100; i++))
   do
   wget -q -O - http://www.yoursite.com
   sleep 1
   done
;;
esac

make it executable, copy it into the /etc/init.d directory, make a symlink to it in your default runlevel init directory (/etc/rc2.d for Debian &co, /etc/rc5.d for other distros) and name the link S99myscript.

Now everytime your instance boot, it will send 100 http requests to your site (1 per second).

M

Answer 3

I use WinServ (http://www.sw4me.com/wiki/Winserv) instead of the resource kit, since there could be issues with the 2k3 resource kit on 2k8. Plus WinServ will let you use a batch file for your service, etc.. And its free.