msd.txt

The toughest part was getting access to an EC2 instance.  I followed
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/concepts.html#access-ec2
To set up the aws command line interface, I followed
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-welcome.html
-> http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-getting-set-up.html
-> http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/installing.html#install-bundle-other-os
(for my MacBook)
-> http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-getting-started.html
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/AccessingInstancesLinux.html
I don't recall how I set up the public/private key pair, but it wasn't
that hard.

Once I had a running default, mininum-cost default Ubuntu EC2 instance
running in the us-east-1 region ("N. Virginia"), I was able to use the
AWS web EC2 Dashboard to create a EBS instance from the Million Song
Dataset snapshot, snap-5178cf30, following the directions on:

  http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-public-data-sets.html#using-public-data-sets-launching-mounting

then attach it to my Ubuntu instance following:

  http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-attaching-volume.html

Then I ssh'd into the instance:

> ssh -i ~/Documents/aws/amazonec2.pem ubuntu@54.173.207.160

(where amazonec2.pem is the security certificate I created when setting up ec2)

Because I had already attached the snapshot, it was already there:

ubuntu@ip-172-30-0-62:~$ sudo file -s /dev/xvdf
/dev/xvdf: Linux rev 1.0 ext3 filesystem data,
UUID=21a8ff2f-0b14-46a8-8e69-62951b27dfd4 (large files)

So I just had to mount it:

ubuntu@ip-172-30-0-62:~$ sudo mkdir /mnt/snap
ubuntu@ip-172-30-0-62:~$ sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/xvdf /mnt/snap
ubuntu@ip-172-30-0-62:~$ ls /mnt/snap
AdditionalFiles  data  LICENSE  lost+found  README
ubuntu@ip-172-30-0-62:~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda1      7.8G  808M  6.6G  11% /
none            4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev            492M   12K  492M   1% /dev
tmpfs           100M  328K   99M   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            497M     0  497M   0% /run/shm
none            100M     0  100M   0% /run/user
/dev/xvdf       493G  272G  196G  59% /mnt/snap

The 493G partition at the end (which is only 272G used) is the MSD
data.  You could scp it off that linux instance, but it probably makes
sense to run your processing on the EC2 instance itself.

  DAn.