Windows Tips

These are notes tested on a Windows 8 machine accessing Amazon Web Services and Nucleator.

Useful Software to Load onto your Windows Machine

1. git can be installed on a Windows machine to load the Nucleator documentation onto your local native machine.  There are two distributions of git available for Windows; one is available at http://www.cygwin.com/ and another is available at http://msysgit.github.io/.
2. The msysgit git package also contains ssh-keygen, which is helpful for generating access key pairs as .pem files needed for accessing resources throughout the Nucleator processing.  It also contains the git bash tool, which is an alternative to the Windows Command Prompt screen, used for command line input.  Git bash follows more unix like conventions for command line entry.
3. ssh can be installed on a Windows machine for connecting to EC2 processes using their Public DNS name.  ssh for Windows can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/sshwindows/.
4. scp and putty may be of use when trying to transfer files and communicate with remote virtual machines used when running Nucleator.  These are available from http://winscp.net/eng/download.php.

Methods of Accessing Nucleator from a Windows Machine

Nucleator runs on Linux systems.  The easiest way to use Nucleator if you are on Windows is to gain access to a Linux system.  There are two methods of accessing an appropriate Linux virtual machine for Nucleator from a Windows machine:

1.  Build a VirtualBox machine running Linux on the Windows machine.  Instructions to install VirtualBox and its Extension Packs can be found at https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads.
   These notes were tested on an Ubuntu Linux system running on a VirtualBox.
   If you use a VirtualBox Linux host to access Nucleator, you would be using a terminal window running software loaded onto you virtual linux machine.  Nucleator actions and commands would be done on the virtualbox linux machine via this terminal window.
2.  Launch an AWS EC2 instance running Linux.  Instructions to do this can be found at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-launch-instance_linux.html.  These notes were tested on an Ubuntu Linux system running on an EC2 instance, which has python version 2.7 preinstalled.  AWS Linux has version 2.6 of python installed and will require an update of python before use of Nucleator or running python in a virtualenv, which is an additional complication. 
   
   If you use an EC2 instance to access Nucleator, you would use either a Windows Command Prompt screen, accessed from the Start icon on the left of your icon tray, or a Git bash window, loaded with the msysgit package, or putty.
   
   ssh would be used to connect to the EC2 instance using an access key generated on AWS for the EC2 instance and the Public DNS Name for the EC2 instance available from the AWS console in the EC2 Instance Section.  Nucleator actions and commands would then be done on the EC2 instance.
   
   If your EC2 instance is running Ubuntu Linux, your ssh connection would look something like:
   ssh –i <my access key file>.pem ubuntu@<public dns name of ec2 instance>
   
   If your EC2 instance is running Redhat or AWS Linux, your ssh connection would look something like:
   ssh –i <my access key file>.pem ec2-user@<public dns name of ec2 instance>

Things to Remember About Accessing Linux Virtual Machines from a Windows Machine

1. End of line conventions differ between Linux machines (newline or \n, decimal 12) and Windows (carriage return and newline pairs, \r\n, decimal 15 and decimal 12).  When sending files between the machines be sure to convert the end of lines appropriately.  Going to Linux, carriage returns can be removed by vi or awk.  Going to Windows, carriage returns will be inserted automatically by Wordpad.
2. Copy and paste between screens responding to Windows and screens responding to Linux can be awkward.  Remember that copy and paste characters on Windows are control c and control v, while copy and paste characters on Linux machines can vary, but often are control-shift c and control-shift v.  In addition, copy and paste into and out of a Windows Command Prompt screen is managed by a pull down menu accessed via the Command Prompt Title bar at the top of the screen using a right click.  If highlighting is not available in your Command Prompt screen, Select All and Copy via the Title bar pull-downs may be your only copy option.

Things to Remember About Accessing Amazon Web Services from Windows

1. Using web browsers to access the AWS Console and the IAM Console, whether Internet Explorer, Chrome or Firefox, result in all browser windows accessing the same account login to these AWS tools.  (This is the same in all OS types.)  If you need to use a different account at any time within these tools, logout from your AWS account on one screen and all other browser connected to AWS will ask you to re-login.  Different IE windows open concurrently will always access one account.