Windows Server 2012 R2 in AWS EC2, change resolution beyond 1280×1024

(Strange post, so hopefully this won't be as strange a reply).

On the subject of security flaws: it is considered general bad practice to store cgi-bin scripts within the document root of the web server. Even the W3C eludes to it under "Are compiled languages such as C safer ..." in their World Wide Web Security FAQ:

Consider the following scenario. For convenience's sake, you've decided to identify CGI scripts to the server using the .cgi extension. Later on, you need to make a small change to an interpreted CGI script. You open it up with the Emacs text editor and modify the script. Unfortunately the edit leaves a backup copy of the script source code lying around in the document tree. Although the remote user can't obtain the source code by fetching the script itself, he can now obtain the backup copy by blindly requesting the URL:

    http://your-site/a/path/your_script.cgi~

(This is another good reason to limit CGI scripts to cgi-bin and to make sure that cgi-bin is separate from the document root.)

This is not as significant a threat as the ability to write a file within the document root. However, an attacker could obtain the source code of the cgi, devise a directed attack against it, and use it as a stepping stone into the server.

To mitigate this, you can add the following lines to the lighttpd.conf (or some variation therein) to direct cgi-bin to a directory separate from the /var/www/lighttpd document root.

$HTTP["url"] =~ "/cgi-bin/" { cgi.assign = ( "" => "" ) }
alias.url = ( "/cgi-bin/" => "/usr/lib/cgi-bin/" )

This requires both the cgi and alias modules for lighttpd.

First install xvfb which will allow you to run it with a "virtual screen".

sudo yum -y install xorg-x11-server-Xvfb 

Then you should check out this helpful post which will help you get firefox installed on amazon EC2. This is because you can't just do sudo yum install firefox on EC2. So, basically you create a file (I used this gist) on the EC2 instance that he provides and then run it to install firefox and all of it's dependancies. http://joekiller.com/2012/06/03/install-firefox-on-amazon-linux-x86_64-compiling-gtk/

When the script runs it will install firefox in

/usr/local/bin/firefox

by default I believe.

Once it has installed you probably then need to add it to your path as the above link also explains. But you should also add the DISPLAY system variable though so do something like this...

cat << EOF >> ~/.bashrc
PATH=/usr/local/bin:\$PATH
DISPLAY=:99
export PATH
export DISPLAY
EOF

Then you have to kick off xvfb for screen 99 so it will be able to run firefox on it's "virtual screen". Like so...

Xvfb :99 -screen 0 1024x768x16 &

Then hopefully when you re-run your selenium tests it will find firefox on the path and run it in the correct "virtualised" screen on that EC2 instance.

As a side note - I am not by any means an expert of any type in amazon linux so... Goodluck.

Alternatively, you could investigate running against selenium server which you could fire up on an amazon EC2 ubuntu micro instance, which you can easily setup to have a GUI.