Ant, SCP and EC2

I've have had to deal with a strange set of circumstances

1. No ant-jsh.jar in my deployment

I got the error

BUILD FAILED

Deploy.ant.xml:57: Problem: failed to create task or type scp

Cause: the class org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.ssh.Scp was not found.

This looks like one of Ant's optional components.

Action: Check that the appropriate optional JAR exists in

-/usr/share/ant/lib

-/Users/alvinrichards/.ant/lib

-a directory added on the command line with the -lib argument

Do not panic, this is a common problem.

The commonest cause is a missing JAR.

This is not a bug; it is a configuration problem

Turns out that the default deployment of Ant (1.7) did not contain this jar on Mac OS-x 10.5. So I had to do two things

1. Download the binary distribution of Ant 1.7, unpack the jar and copy ant-jsch.jar to /usr/share/ant/lib
2. Download the implementation of the SSH java code from JCraft and copy it to /usr/share/ant/lib

2. I still can't SCP to EC2

So I know I can scp -i to this EC2 host, but the following Ant task fails

<scp localfile="dba.war"

todir="root@xxxx:/usr/java/apache-tomcat-6.0.14/webapps/"

keyfile="xxxx-Amazon-LAMP-image-keypair">

with

BUILD FAILED

/Volumes/Develop/Develop/Projects/HarpoonDeployMK9a/Deploy.ant.xml:57: neither password nor passphrase for user root has been given. Can't authenticate.

Turns out that you need the following in the SCP task for it to work with EC2

trust="yes"

passphrase="xxx"

The passphrase that worked happened to be my password for my AWS account...

End of life... Oh Amazon stop making me do work!

So, like many early adopters I have the pain of being an early adopter. The most recent is the delightful email I got from Amazon.

Dear Amazon SQS Customer,

This is a friendly reminder about the upcoming deprecation and end-of-life for the Amazon SQS 2006/2007 WSDL.

Talk about a "Dear John" letter. In the end it was not much work, just needed to download the latest version of Typica 1.5.2a and then change

import com.xerox.amazonws.sqs.Message;

import com.xerox.amazonws.sqs.MessageQueue;

import com.xerox.amazonws.sqs.QueueService;

import com.xerox.amazonws.sqs.SQSException;

to

import com.xerox.amazonws.sqs2.Message;

import com.xerox.amazonws.sqs2.MessageQueue;

import com.xerox.amazonws.sqs2.QueueService;

import com.xerox.amazonws.sqs2.SQSException;

The only problem so far is that the old version of Typica (0.8) included in the jar ch.inventec.Base64Coder.class which is need to run. I resorted to including the old Typica jar on the class path after a fruitless search for this class elsewhere.

So I'm no back running with the new WSDL and a happier Jeff Bezos.

Now I just have to rip out the code that did on demand scaling and load balancing...