In my previous post I discussed how to use ElasticFox to start a windows instance in EC2. In that post in order to keep it simple I avoided discussing security groups. Security groups in EC2 are basically just instructions to EC2 on how to open firewall ports to allow communications to your system.
In ElasticFox, open the Security Groups tab and you will see something similar to the follow, although this is showing a security group called '42Spikes' that I've already added and run this site in:
To create a new security group, press the green '+' button, and you will be presented with the following dialog:
I've entered a name and description, as well as leaving the default for SSH and RDP to be opened. When pressing create group, ElasticFox will create the group in EC2 for you, and present you with the following:
Notice the new group is created, you see under 'Group Permissions' that TCP ports 22 and 3389 are open in this group. If you open any instance in this group, SSH and RDP access will be possible with the system.
Now lets open up more access to the system, specifically for FTP access. To do this, click the green check in the group permissions section. When doing this, you'll be presented with the following dialog:
This dialog gives your a few options on the 'External' tab. First you select the protocol you want by name (the default is SSH). Unfortunately, FTP is not in the default list (don't ask me why), so I select 'Other', which allows me to enter a rand of TCP/IP ports. Also, I want all packets to go to my specific host, so I will press 'Get My Host Address', which will populate the Host address field with the address of my one system:
This now is setup to configure FTP access (port 21) to my system, and after pressing 'Add' you can see the configuration changed back in the main form (I already has this there, so I wont press add).
Now to be honest, I haven't tried to see if these changes take effect on an instance in that group that is already running, or if you have to restart it. I'll look into that and get back...