Part 2: Tutorial, Developing Deep Learning on AWS

Establish a graphical interface and remote desktop connection

In Part Two of our five-part series we walk you through the steps that Vision Elements engineers take to establish a graphical interface and remote desktop connection while using Amazon cloud computing (AWS).

In our previous post, we launched an AWS instance and connected it via SSH. In principle, we can now start working. However, sometimes when our development team is working on a project, we like to connect via remote desktop connection (RDP) and have a graphical user interface.  In this post, we will show you what steps you should take to achieve this.

Step 1. Select the instance you have been using on the instance page and then click on security.

Step 2. Under inbound rules click on the security group.

Step 3. Select the correct security group, and under Actions choose Edit inbound rules.

Step 4. Edit the inbound rules to have both SSH and RDP.

Now we will connect to AWS and install the software for the RDP and graphical interface.

Step 5. Connect to the AWS instance as described in Part 1 of this series of blogs, and then type the following commands:

1. Set the firewall.

sudo ufw status

sudo ufw enable sudo ufw allow 3389/tcp
sudo ufw allow 22/tcp

2. Create password for RDP.

sudo su - passwd ubuntu

3. Choose a new password, this will be the password that we will use in the RDP.

4. Install xrdp.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install xrdp

5. Install a graphical interface.

sudo apt-get install xfce4
sudo apt-get install xfce4-terminal

sudo sed -i.bak '/fi/a #xrdp multiple users configuration \n xfce-session \n' /etc/xrdp/startwm.sh

6. Restart.

sudo /etc/init.d/xrdp restart

7. Set the simple interface as default.

sudo update-alternatives –config x-session-manager

8. Choose xfce4-session.

Now we are ready for the RDP connection.

Step 6. On your local machine open a remote desktop connection.

Step 7. Copy the public ipv4 address and type it into the remote desktop connection.

Step 8. Type ubuntu under the username and the password you set up in step 5.

Establish a connection to AWS and you can now use it with the graphical interface.

Side Note: Whenever you stop and restart an instance you should connect first via SSH and type:

sudo systemctl restart xrdp

In Part 3 of this blog series on “Developing Deep Learning on AWS,” we will cover how computer vision and data scientists work with large amounts of data on an AWS instance.