Availability

Technical support is available to all active subscribers and license holders.  For the fastest service, use the Technical Support Request form, select the “AWS Marketplace” license type, then provide your AWS Account ID and contact information.

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Limitations

When seeking technical support, be aware of the following limitations:

• The “Single AMI” delivery method requires that you correctly configure an IAM Role and Security Group, then use SSH to setup the gateway.  New users are strongly encouraged to use the “CloudDat” (CloudFormation) delivery method instead.  See Installation for details.
• The CloudDat instance must be located in the same region as your S3 bucket.  If you need to access buckets in multiple regions, you must use multiple instances.
• EC2 instances change their public IP address every time they are restarted.  You can acquire a persistent public address by creating and assigning an Elastic IP address.
• Inline compression is not available with S3.  ExpeDat Desktop‘s Compression checkbox will be disabled whenever the S3 handler is selected.  Inline compression is available with EBS and instance-storage.
• Check-point restart is not available with S3.  If a transfer fails due to network disruption, the client will automatically attempt to restart from the beginning.  Check-point restart is available with EBS and instance-storage.
• Hourly and Monthly CloudDat instances support up to 4 simultaneous actions, including uploads, downloads, bucket listings, etc.  Monthly High Capacity supports up to 32 simultaneous actions.
• Performing multiple actions at the same time may reduce the bandwidth available to each.
• Once the client reports full progress uploading data, it must wait for S3 to confirm acceptance of the object.  This can take up to a minute, depending on S3 conditions.
• Folders do not exist in S3 buckets.  Some folder functionality is emulated using pseudo-folders.  See the Folders section for details.
• Some restricted regions, such as China and GovCloud, may require a different S3 endpoint than the default “http://s3.amazonaws.com“.  See "Advanced Configuration" for instructions on setting alternate endpoints.
• The CloudDat instance divides uploading files into multiple parts for faster speeds over the last few yards into S3.  When the size of the file is known, the gateway automatically adjusts the part size to work around AWS’ limit of 10,000 parts.  But if you are streaming or piping data into movedat, the gateway defaults to a part size of 8 megabytes.  To stream or pipe uploading objects larger than 80 gigabytes, you must increase the part size by raising the default chunksize value near the end of /usr/local/expedat/s3handler.sh.  Increasing this value will increase the amount of instance RAM required, so you may need to use a larger instance size.

When submitting a Technical Support Request, please provide as much information as possible.  We may require server logs or client screenshots, so have these ready.  Please allow up to 1 business day for a response.

Troubleshooting

You may be able to resolve these common issues on your own:

• If the client is unable to reach the CloudDat instance due to “No Response” or “Unreachable” errors, check the following:

  • Visit the instance web page to verify that the instance is running and the server is up.
  • Check that the ExpeDat client has the correct public IP address of the EC2 instance.  This address will change each time the instance is restarted, so consider assigning an Elastic IP address.
  • Verify that the instance’s security group allows for UDP port 8080.  Check that the instance’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) allows for UDP port 8080 from the Internet.
  • Check that your local firewall allows UDP port 8080 to reach the Internet.
• If the client receives a “Bad Credentials” error, check that you have entered the same username and password into the client that you specified during setup.  To change the password, see the section on managing Multiple Users.
• If you receive an “Invalid Pathname” or “Invalid Object Description” error, check that you are accessing the correct bucket name, path prefix, and file name.
• An “Unsupported Feature” error  indicates that you have attempted to use an ExpeDat feature which is not supported by CloudDat, or the server you specified has not been configured to support CloudDat.
• For a “User must select an object handler” error, check that your ExpeDat client has selected the “S3” object handler.  See “Client Use” for screenshots and examples.  If you are using an ExpeDat Desktop client from another source and the “Handler” menu does not appear, you will need to add “S3” to the “Server Handlers” list in the Options -> Setup dialog.  See the ExpeDat Desktop documentation for details.
• If you are unable to resolve an error with the information displayed in the client, you can find additional information by using SSH to connect to the instance and looking in /var/log/servedat.log and /tmp/s3logs/.  servedat.log records the start and stop of each transaction as well as server configuration and health information.  Errors from the CloudDat S3 handler will be recorded in individual files in the /tmp/s3logs/ directory.  The name of each file includes the servedat transaction id, so you can match it to events in the servedat log file.