Elasticfox and ssh

I've been working on the Elasticfox Firefox extension, which was recently open sourced. It's a GUI for Amazon's EC2 webservice and is great way to use the service without having to worry about WSDLs and XML.

One improvement I'm pleased with is the support for opening ssh connections to instances. Elasticfox now tries to make good choices for the terminal and ssh programs to run, with the result that it works (almost) out of the box on Mac and *NIX, and (almost-almost) Windows.

For Mac OS X and *NIX, you just need to set the location of your instance ssh keypairs and Elasticfox will launch Terminal and gnome-terminal, respectively. For Windows, you also need to install PuTTY, which Elasticfox expects to find in c:\Program Files\Putty\putty.exe. The error handling when ssh fails has also been improved, which should make getting it to work using your own solution simpler.

Another small improvement is that you can now ssh into many instances in one go, just by selecting more than one in the instance list. This is a real crowd-pleaser when you launch ten instances and, in a few minutes, have logged into all ten, with only a few mouse clicks.

You can install an interim build with these changes if you like to be cutting edge.

If you're new to the extension, take a read through the tutorial that was posted on the EC2 forums.

You might also be interested in the standalone Elasticfox executable for Windows that AideRSS put together. Their description is for an older version of Elasticfox, but the principle is sound. It's particularly useful if the latency between you and EC2 is high enough (because, say, you're at the tip of Africa) that the synchronous API calls hang Firefox.

For the record, the build also includes these updates:

• FIX: sf.net bug 1898177: Adding ICMP firewall rules requires filling in TCP fields.
  
• FIX: sf.net bug 1894182: Choosing security group while launching AMI instance UI bug
  
• opens in a new tab by default
  
• ssh to multiple instances at once
  
• choose platform-dependent defaults for ssh
  
• FIX: redraw lists when sort order has changed
  
• first steps towards branding as Elasticfox