Welcome to the Amazon Web Services developer forums. In order to expedite community response to your posts, please keep the following in mind when posting:

• Search. Answers to many questions can be found in previous forum postings or in the Resource Center. Use the search bar at the top right of the screen to search the entire Developer Connection (content and forums), or search only forums postings by using the advanced search capability.

• Frequently Asked Questions. Another great place to look for a quick answer is the Amazon EC2 Frequently Asked Questions article.

• Choose informative thread titles. When starting a new thread, choose a title that captures the essence of your question.

• Provide details. Aim to provide enough information so that follow-up or clarification questions aren't necessary. Include details about the request you are sending and the response you are receiving. Posting the actual request and error response is always helpful. In particular, when troubleshooting be sure to include the following details:
1. Feel free to post your account ID, access key ID, or certificate thumbprint (the long string of characters embedded in the private key/cert generated by the AWS portal). Any of these will help us to identify you when troubleshooting problems you're experiencing.
2. If you're struggling with image registration please post the location in Amazon S3 of the manifest file (end in .manfest or .manifest.xml).
3. If you're struggling to boot a registered AMI please post the AMI ID.
4. If you have booted an instance and are having problems with it (network or otherwise) then please post the instance ID. The DNS name or IP address can also help us if you don't have the former, but generally only if the instance is still running.
5. If you're seeing an error returned by our API then please post the output of ec2-version and the output generated by command in question (e.g. ec2-describe-instances) reattempted with the -v flag.
6. If you're struggling to bundle or upload an AMI (or anything related to the AMI tools) then please post the version you have installed. For the RPM installation this can be retrieved using rpm -q ec2-ami-tools. On other distros you'll need to provide details of this and any changes that were made to get the AMI tools working on that distro.

• Never include your AWS Secret Access Key or Private Keys. In general, do not post (or do replace with asterisks) security-related elements of requests, such as Authorization headers, Signature parameters, or Signature elements.

• Private Messages. During the troubleshooting of an issue, an Amazon engineer may ask you to provide additional information via a PM (or Private Message). This typically happens when we require information that is personal in nature, such as your access key, email address, or any other information someone may not want posted on a public forum.

Private Messages should not, however, be used to initiate discussions with Amazon about an issue. All technical questions should be posted to the forums where both AWS staff and the community are available to assist you.

• Use the appropriate channel. For questions that require you to submit sensitive information, please send an e-mail to webservices@amazon.com. If you have a business / licensing question about Amazon Web Services' offerings, please e-mail us at aws@amazon.com. Please seek Amazon support via these channels over using private messages.

• Post code between [code] and [/code] tags. This will help make posts involving code more readable.

• Always follow the Community Guidelines .