With our Net Neutrality rights hanging in the balance, and the recent scandals around Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, there has been a renewed interest in greater privacy when browsing the web. An excellent tool to keep your web browsing private is a browser called Tor. This browser works by connecting to a special anonymized network of relay nodes that bounce traffic around the web in an encrypted, anonymous fashion. In order to help out, anyone can set up their own relays and contribute bandwith and computing resources to this network. This tutorial will show you how to set up a Tor relay using EC2 and Ansible for configuration management.

Personally, I find AWS's documentation on setting up dynamic inventory/EC2 for use with Ansible to be a bit cryptic, so thought I'd write what is (at least to me) a simpler way to do it.

I recently needed to put a GUI on an EC2 instance running RHEL 7. In working through all the quirks to get it running, I noticed there weren't a lot of tutorials that covered this particular use case. There were plenty on Ubuntu running on EC2, and plenty on RHEL 6/7 on a regular machine, but not a whole lot for the combo. Here's how to do that.