Does anyone have a step-by-step guide to setting up jwinterm's AMI to solo-mine? I have it pool-mining, but solo-mining using the above link is a bit over my head.
You gotta have some serious hash if you want to solo mine, pa, or be willing to keep your AMI instance running for a long time. Optimistically, you will get 650 h/s per instance on Amazon. Current difficulty is 1.14e9, so you would need on average 1.14e9 hashes / 650 h/s = 1.75e6 seconds = 20 days or so, and with variance that could be well over a month, and also difficulty may increase significantly in the next month as well.
Unless you plan on running the instance(s) for several weeks at least, or you're going to run 20-30 instances, I wouldn't even worry about trying to solo mine. I would just recommend using a pool with less than 100 kh/s. You can find a list of smaller pools with here:
http://minexmr.com/pools.htmlscroll down to see smaller pools.