I am not a security guru nor a hacker. But I listen to what people say about security, vulnerabilities, exploits etc. And I am aware that default installation of anything (including whole LAMP stack) is not secured. Amazon’s guides about LAMP and WordPress contain some security topics. So your installation will not be completely ridiculous 🙂 But Amazon also has a nice guide for setting up SSL/TLS. And it worked perfectly for me!

That idea with AWS VPN doesn’t work in long term. My client couldn’t connect again. So I dropped that stack and forgot about VPNs for now. Well, that CloudFormation template at least can be used if someone needs to provision temporal personal VPN in few minutes.

Ok, I’ve got some feedback after using solution I described previously. First of all that thing stopped working the very next day. Given that I didn’t have SSH keys to login there, I couldn’t investigate why. I just dropped CloudFormation stack and created another one. So far so good. Second disappointment is that I couldn’t make it work with Linux Mint. Network Manager’s PPTP plugin doesn’t work at all. I even installed client for L2TP/IPSec, but failed to get working connection.

I first read the idea of using VPN to access your AWS instances in one of many books about AWS (maybe it was AWS for Dummies?). Author created a EC2 instance based on AMI with OpenVPN. I decided to do the similar thing. 10 years ago I setup OpenVPN server myself right on the main router on my job. I had to compile it from sources and then configure. Now I am too lazy for that and found a nice article How to setup your private VPN on Amazon AWS.

This morning I decided to play with Appearance settings in WordPress. Well, you can add images to header or as a background etc. But when you select an image it asks you to crop it and fails with “There has been error cropping your image”! The solution was googled quickly, thanks to yuan3y.com. For Amazon Linux I had to do this: sudo yum install php56-gd sudo service httpd restart

My new domain name is apalagin.net. Thanks to Amazon’s Route 53 that was super easy. And cheap. Amazon is not an actual domain register (as they say). But they allow to register tons of domains! Though my favorite domain .expert wasn’t there 🙂

Installed WordPress to AWS! That was easy! I’ve been using AWS for 3 years in a row. But only for job projects and primarily it was some ready-to-use service as SQS, S3 or SNS. Never thought of running my own server. But here it is! Just 20 minutes of monkey work from Hosting a WordPress Blog with Amazon Linux tutorial and you’re done!