On Jan 12, 2012, at 1:29 PM, mailing list wrote:

Hi guys,

I've asked some questions about sharing an instance but it doesn't
seem to be working the way I'm expecting (Unfortunately I'm also new
to Amazon EC2/S3 so that may be part of my difficulty).  I'm thinking
maybe if I can explain what I'm trying to do, you guys could tell me
the best way to do it:

My End Goal:

So I want to install a bioinformatics program* (and it's dependencies
e.g., R, samtools, biopython, etc) that will use SGE provided by
CloudMan.
Then once everything is configured and installed, I want to share it
with other researchers.

For what it's worth, including Galaxy might make this all a little bit more accessible.  That said, this should definitely work in the barebones scenario you're suggesting.

I'm envisioning them launching Cloudman via
http://biocloudcentral.herokuapp.com, having some method to get at my
customizations, loading their own data via SCP and then running it.

What I've Tried So Far:

I created an instance of CloudMan,
I chose the data cluster option on the first dialog.
Then I ssh'd in and installed stuff on /mnt/galaxyData
Then I clicked the share icon on the cloudman front page.
(But when I look in S3 I don't think I'm seeing the programs I
installed, and I'm not sure how my /mnt/galaxyData volume can be
shared with the sharestring.)

You won't see the programs in S3.  They're installed on an EBS volume which you've taken a snapshot of as a part of the sharing process.  If you click 'Snapshots' in your AWS Management Console, you should see it.

The shared cluster string is the correct way to provide your customizations to another user.  From what it sounds like, you were *almost* there.  If you click the instance sharing icon again, you should see something like:

With a list of share strings and snapshot id's.  Let me know if this isn't what you're seeing and I can try and troubleshoot.

Good luck!

-Dannon