We're looking at running a Sun Grid Engine HPC cluster on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Unfortunately I couldn't find a CentOS 5 / SGE Amazon Machine Image, so I have been looking at RightScale's public AMIs.
Monday at 3:02pm (EST), I booted a RightScale AMI. Apparently I forgot to shut it down, which entails a small charge from Amazon, but their pricing is low enough that's not a big deal. The oddity, however, showed up the next morning.
Subject: New instance operational: 'i-7e1c0716'
Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 09:12:57 +0000
From: notifier@my.rightscale.com
To: pepper@***
Your instance i-7e1c0716 created at 2010-02-09 09:12:57 is now available. This image booted in less than a minute.
It can be reached at ec2-72-44-61-196.compute-1.amazonaws.com or it can be managed in RightScale by logging in and going to:
https://my.rightscale.com/clouds/1/ec2_instances/*******
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I wondered if someone had subverted my RightScale or AWS account, but it looks like RightScale just didn't notice the instance was running until 4:12am (EST) the next day -- a bit over 9 hours after it actually booted. I haven't used RightScale enough to know if this is typical, but it's certainly odd.
pepper@teriyaki:~$ ec2-describe-instances
[Deprecated] Xalan: org.apache.xml.res.XMLErrorResources_en_US
RESERVATION r-6e452e06 290259848388 default
INSTANCE i-7e1c0716 ami-f8b35e91 ec2-72-44-61-196.compute-1.amazonaws.com domU-12-31-39-0B-28-A7.compute-1.internal running *** 0 m1.small 2010-02-08T20:00:54+0000 us-east-1a aki-a71cf9ce ari-a51cf9cc monitoring-disabled 72.44.61.196 10.214.47.85 instance-store
pepper@teriyaki:~/Sites$ ssh ec2-72-44-61-196.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Last login: Mon Feb 8 15:02:30 2010 from 140.163.***.***
___ _ __ __ ____ __
/ _ \ (_)___ _ / / / /_ / __/____ ___ _ / /___
/ , _// // _ `// _ \/ __/_\ \ / __// _ `// // -_)
/_/|_|/_/ \_, //_//_/\__//___/ \__/ \_,_//_/ \__/
/___/
Welcome to a public Amazon EC2 image brought to you by RightScale!
********************************************************************
********************************************************************
*** Your EC2 Instance is now operational. ***
*** All of the configuration has completed. ***
*** Please check /var/log/install for details. ***
********************************************************************
********************************************************************
[root@domU-12-31-39-0B-28-A7 ~]# w
10:13:47 up 1 day, 19:11, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
root pts/0 140.163.***.*** 10:13 0.00s 0.00s 0.00s w
[root@domU-12-31-39-0B-28-A7 ~]# date
Wed Feb 10 10:14:01 EST 2010
[root@domU-12-31-39-0B-28-A7 ~]# last
root pts/0 140.163.***.*** Wed Feb 10 10:13 still logged in
root pts/0 140.163.***.*** Mon Feb 8 15:02 - 17:53 (02:50)
reboot system boot 2.6.21.7-2.fc8xe Mon Feb 8 15:02 (1+19:14)
wtmp begins Mon Feb 8 15:02:22 2010
[root@domU-12-31-39-0B-28-A7 ~]#