How to identify Amazon AWS EC2 instance? - amazon-ec2

Is there a system file that authoritatively tells me if a host is an Amazon AWS EC2 instance?
Bonus point: without installing anything new, is there a command that will tell me some basic parameters of an EC2 instance?
Context:
~~~~~~~~
I have a script that gathers information.
If I run the script on an EC2 instance, some "standard" commands are not available,
for example: dmidecode (this gives me practically nothing), or virt-what.
I am aware of /usr/bin/ec2-describe-instances, or wget for metadata script, or wget
for individual components reported by metadata, but I don't want to install anything
new, and I need the tool to describe the host itself (since the script runs locally),
not to inquire another host, or pass a key that I must obtain from yet another script
that I must install first.
Maybe wget for a specific metadata info is the best tool I could use?
Thanks

I cannot guarantee this will work on any other AMI than Ubuntu 12.04 (I am using ami-8e987ef9) - please test yourself.
Here is what you might want to check out if you really want to avoid getting this info from the magic IP 169.254.169.254 and metadata as #Rico suggested:
### Datasource EC2
ubuntu#ip-10-33-59-70:~$ cat /var/lib/cloud/instance/datasource
cloudinit.DataSourceEc2.DataSourceEc2: DataSourceEc2
ubuntu#ip-10-33-59-70:~$ cat /var/lib/cloud/data/previous-datasource
cloudinit.DataSourceEc2.DataSourceEc2: DataSourceEc2
### Hostname
ubuntu#ip-10-33-59-70:~$ cat /var/lib/cloud/data/previous-hostname
ip-10-33-59-70
### Instance ID
ubuntu#ip-10-33-59-70:~$ cat /var/lib/cloud/data/previous-instance-id
i-280ace69
### Instance ID also (check out instance symlink)
ubuntu#ip-10-33-59-70:/var/lib/cloud$ ls -al | grep instance
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 Jan 29 22:00 instance -> ./instances/i-280ace69
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 29 22:00 instances
Maybe looking around /var/lib/cloud will give you some info that you need without using curl.
I would rather suggest using the magic IP with metadata though.
On Ubuntu 12.04 there's also /usr/bin/ec2metadata, a util written in Python that actually queries 169.254.169.254.

Just use the standard way of querying the metadata
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id
For a list of all the metadata options:
curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/
If you get anything other than a '200' then it means it's not an EC2 instance.

From the documentation:
[ec2-user ~]$ cat /sys/hypervisor/uuid
For HVM:
[ec2-user ~]$ sudo dmidecode --string system-uuid
[ec2-user ~]$ sudo cat /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/product_uuid
If the strings start with "ec2" or "EC2", the OS is running on an EC2 instance.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/identify_ec2_instances.html

Related

Icinga2 check_by_ssh plugin returns 255 without running the command

I'm configuring a Icinga2 server and want it to run local scripts on external machines using the check_by_ssh plugin, and I encountered a strange issue. I've searched for an answer for few hours, but no luck.
My command object looks as follows:
object CheckCommand "check_procs" {
import "by_ssh"
vars.by_ssh_logname = "root"
vars.by_ssh_port = "22"
vars.by_ssh_command = "/tmp/test.sh"
vars.by_ssh_identity = "/etc/icinga2/conf.d/services/id_rsa.pub"
vars.by_ssh_ipv4 = "true"
vars.by_ssh_quiet = "true"
}
The content of test.sh is simply exit 0. I have a trust between my Icinga box and the remote machine I'm running the command at.
When I'm executing the command thru shell, it works
[root#icinga ~]# ssh root#10.10.10.1 -C "/tmp/test.sh"
[root#icinga ~]# echo $?
0
But when it is executed by the server, I see on my Icingaweb2 this output:
UNKNOWN - check_by_ssh: Remote command '/tmp/test.sh' returned status 255
Now I have added a touch success to test.sh script, in order to see if it is executed at all - but it seems it doesn't. That means when Icinga executes my script, it fails before even executing it.
Any clues what can it be? There are no many examples online either of check_by_ssh with Icinga2.
NOTE: Icinga uses root user to identify with the remote server. I know this is not best practice, but this is development env.
UPDATE: I think I have found the issue. The problem is that I'm trying to use root user to login the remote machine. This IS NOT supported, even with public key authentication. The script has to be executed with the user icinga
2nd Update: I got it works. The issue was keys authentication, the fact that icinga uses the user icinga to execute the command (even when using by_ssh_logname attribute) and the addition of vars.by_ssh_options = "StrictHostKeyChecking no"
My problem was that the used rsa key files wasn't owned by the "nagios" user:
-rw------- 1 nagios nagios 3.2K Nov 30 14:43 id_rsa
-rw-r--r-- 1 nagios nagios 766 Nov 30 14:42 id_rsa.pub
I've found the issues, there were few of them in my case.
Icinga used icinga user to login through SSH, even when I used -l root. So, to install ssh keys I had to execute ssh-copy-id icinga#HOST under root user (Icinga shell is set to /sbin/nologin)
I then copied the private key (again, of the root user) to icinga folder so it is accessible for the application, and changed the ownership of the file
Next, I tried to login using icinga user to the remote machine sudo -u icinga ssh icinga#HOST -i id_rsa
If step 3 fails, you need to figure it before you continue. Next thing I did was adding StrictHostKeyChecking no to the module options.
Voila, this works now.

Is it secure to store EC2 User-Data shell scripts in a private S3 bucket?

I have an EC2 ASG on AWS and I'm interested in storing the shell script that's used to instantiate any given instance in an S3 bucket and have it downloaded and run upon instantiation, but it all feels a little rickety even though I'm using an IAM Instance Role, transferring via HTTPS, and encrypting the script itself while at rest in the S3 bucket using KMS using S3 Server Side Encryption (because the KMS method was throwing an 'Unknown' error).
The Setup
Created an IAM Instance Role that gets assigned to any instance in my ASG upon instantiation, resulting in my AWS creds being baked into the instance as ENV vars
Uploaded and encrypted my Instance-Init.sh script to S3 resulting in a private endpoint like so : https://s3.amazonaws.com/super-secret-bucket/Instance-Init.sh
In The User-Data Field
I input the following into the User Data field when creating the Launch Configuration I want my ASG to use:
#!/bin/bash
apt-get update
apt-get -y install python-pip
apt-get -y install awscli
cd /home/ubuntu
aws s3 cp s3://super-secret-bucket/Instance-Init.sh . --region us-east-1
chmod +x Instance-Init.sh
. Instance-Init.sh
shred -u -z -n 27 Instance-Init.sh
The above does the following:
Updates package lists
Installs Python (required to run aws-cli)
Installs aws-cli
Changes to the /home/ubuntu user directory
Uses the aws-cli to download the Instance-Init.sh file from S3. Due to the IAM Role assigned to my instance, my AWS creds are automagically discovered by aws-cli. The IAM Role also grants my instance the permissions necessary to decrypt the file.
Makes it executable
Runs the script
Deletes the script after it's completed.
The Instance-Init.sh Script
The script itself will do stuff like setting env vars and docker run the containers that I need deployed on my instance. Kinda like so:
#!/bin/bash
export MONGO_USER='MyMongoUserName'
export MONGO_PASS='Top-Secret-Dont-Tell-Anyone'
docker login -u <username> -p <password> -e <email>
docker run - e MONGO_USER=${MONGO_USER} -e MONGO_PASS=${MONGO_PASS} --name MyContainerName quay.io/myQuayNameSpace/MyAppName:latest
Very Handy
This creates a very handy way to update User-Data scripts without the need to create a new Launch Config every time you need to make a minor change. And it does a great job of getting env vars out of your codebase and into a narrow, controllable space (the Instance-Init.sh script itself).
But it all feels a little insecure. The idea of putting my master DB creds into a file on S3 is unsettling to say the least.
The Questions
Is this a common practice or am I dreaming up a bad idea here?
Does the fact that the file is downloaded and stored (albeit briefly) on the fresh instance constitute a vulnerability at all?
Is there a better method for deleting the file in a more secure way?
Does it even matter whether the file is deleted after it's run? Considering the secrets are being transferred to env vars it almost seems redundant to delete the Instance-Init.sh file.
Is there something that I'm missing in my nascent days of ops?
Thanks for any help in advance.
What you are describing is almost exactly what we are using to instantiate Docker containers from our registry (we now use v2 self-hosted/private, s3-backed docker-registry instead of Quay) into production. FWIW, I had the same "this feels rickety" feeling that you describe when first treading this path, but after almost a year now of doing it -- and compared to the alternative of storing this sensitive configuration data in a repo or baked into the image -- I'm confident it's one of the better ways of handling this data. Now, that being said, we are currently looking at using Hashicorp's new Vault software for deploying configuration secrets to replace this "shared" encrypted secret shell script container (say that five times fast). We are thinking that Vault will be the equivalent of outsourcing crypto to the open source community (where it belongs), but for configuration storage.
In fewer words, we haven't run across many problems with a very similar situation we've been using for about a year, but we are now looking at using an external open source project (Hashicorp's Vault) to replace our homegrown method. Good luck!
An alternative to Vault is to use credstash, which leverages AWS KMS and DynamoDB to achieve a similar goal.
I actually use credstash to dynamically import sensitive configuration data at container startup via a simple entrypoint script - this way the sensitive data is not exposed via docker inspect or in docker logs etc.
Here's a sample entrypoint script (for a Python application) - the beauty here is you can still pass in credentials via environment variables for non-AWS/dev environments.
#!/bin/bash
set -e
# Activate virtual environment
. /app/venv/bin/activate
# Pull sensitive credentials from AWS credstash if CREDENTIAL_STORE is set with a little help from jq
# AWS_DEFAULT_REGION must also be set
# Note values are Base64 encoded in this example
if [[ -n $CREDENTIAL_STORE ]]; then
items=$(credstash -t $CREDENTIAL_STORE getall -f json | jq 'to_entries | .[]' -r)
keys=$(echo $items | jq .key -r)
for key in $keys
do
export $key=$(echo $items | jq 'select(.key=="'$key'") | .value' -r | base64 --decode)
done
fi
exec $#

How to set up a Chef Node on an ec2 instance?

I am trying to use knife bootstrap command from mac terminal
"knife bootstrap node_domain_or_IP -x username -P password -N name_for_node --sudo"
But the problem is, I don't have user name and password, instead the ec2-user has this private key stored in my local work station which helps me to connect to the server.
I find lot of examples for debian os, but hard to find for RHEL on ec2.
OS: RHEL 6
Chef: 11.1.6
Kindly let me know if any details you need to help me better.
Even with host keys you will have a username. Typically, if you are using
ssh -i somekey user#host_or_ip
to ssh to your node, then you would use
knife bootstrap node_domain_or_IP -x username -i sameKey -N chef_name_you_want --sudo
Notice, I use -i rather than -P. That's all there is to it.
An even better option for most people is to use knife ec2 server create to create your node in the first place. This will create the node in AWS and bootstrap it, all in one command.

How to properly configure the Amazon EC2 AMI for 'hadoop-ec2'?

I am trying to launch an instance on Amazon EC2. I have researched this problem extensively, but I have not found any helpful information.
When I run the command hadoop-ec2 launch-cluster mycluster 2, I receive the following error message:
Starting master with AMI.
Required parameter 'AMI' missing (-h for usage)
I have entered my AWS key, AWS secret key, AWS key pairs, etc. I am using hadoop-1.0.4. I am using the default S3 bucket (hadoop-images), but I have tried many other AMIs and I always get the same error message.
Has anybody experience this problem before?
The basic issue is that the search for images the launch-hadoop-master script performs is not returning any results. The most likely cause of this due to the different AMIs that are available in different regions (but it could be due to any changes you've made to S3_BUCKET and HADOOP_VERSION in hadoop-ec2-env.sh).
From the launch-hadoop-master script:
# Finding Hadoop image
AMI_IMAGE=`ec2-describe-images -a | grep $S3_BUCKET
| grep $HADOOP_VERSION
| grep $ARCH
| grep available
| awk '{print $2}'`
# Start a master
echo "Starting master with AMI $AMI_IMAGE"
So, it appears that AMI_IMAGE is not being set to a valid image and thus the search for AMIs that match the various grep filters is failing (the defaults for the Hadoop 1.0.4 distribution are S3_BUCKET is hadoop-images, HADOOP_VERSION is 0.19.0 and ARCH is x86 if you're using m1.small instances). If you search the public AMIs in the US-West-2 region, you'll see that there aren't many Hadoop images, but if you search the public AMIs in the US-East-1 region, you'll see that there are quite a few. Thus, one way around this issue is to work in the US-East-1 region (this is simplest) or, alternatively, set EC2_URL in your login script via export EC2_URL=https://ec2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com but now you need make sure you put your keys in this region from the AWS console.
If you did indeed change HADOOP_VERSION to 1.0.4, I'll note that
ec2-describe-images -a | grep hadoop-images
| grep "1.0.4"'
| grep x86
| grep available
doesn't return any images in the US-East-1 region. Note that the version (HADOOP_VERSION) of the Hadoop distribution that you are running the hadoop-ec2 command from does not need to be the same as the version of Hadoop that the images will be running.
Lastly, as a blunt fix, you could find the AMI that you want to use, and force set AMI_IMAGE to the image name in the launch-hadoop-master and launch-hadoop-cluster scripts.

How can I automate running commands remotely over SSH to multiple servers in parallel?

I've searched around a bit for similar questions, but other than running one command or perhaps a few command with items such as:
ssh user#host -t sudo su -
However, what if I essentially need to run a script on (let's say) 15 servers at once. Is this doable in bash? In a perfect world I need to avoid installing applications if at all possible to pull this off. For argument's sake, let's just say that I need to do the following across 10 hosts:
Deploy a new Tomcat container
Deploy an application in the container, and configure it
Configure an Apache vhost
Reload Apache
I have a script that does all of that, but it relies on me logging into all the servers, pulling a script down from a repo, and then running it. If this isn't doable in bash, what alternatives do you suggest? Do I need a bigger hammer, such as Perl (Python might be preferred since I can guarantee Python is on all boxes in a RHEL environment thanks to yum/up2date)? If anyone can point to me to any useful information it'd be greatly appreciated, especially if it's doable in bash. I'll settle for Perl or Python, but I just don't know those as well (working on that). Thanks!
You can run a local script as shown by che and Yang, and/or you can use a Here document:
ssh root#server /bin/sh <<\EOF
wget http://server/warfile # Could use NFS here
cp app.war /location
command 1
command 2
/etc/init.d/httpd restart
EOF
Often, I'll just use the original Tcl version of Expect. You only need to have that on the local machine. If I'm inside a program using Perl, I do this with Net::SSH::Expect. Other languages have similar "expect" tools.
The issue of how to run commands on many servers at once came up on a Perl mailing list the other day and I'll give the same recommendation I gave there, which is to use gsh:
http://outflux.net/unix/software/gsh
gsh is similar to the "for box in box1_name box2_name box3_name" solution already given but I find gsh to be more convenient. You set up a /etc/ghosts file containing your servers in groups such as web, db, RHEL4, x86_64, or whatever (man ghosts) then you use that group when you call gsh.
[pdurbin#beamish ~]$ gsh web "cat /etc/redhat-release; uname -r"
www-2.foo.com: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant Update 7)
www-2.foo.com: 2.6.9-78.0.1.ELsmp
www-3.foo.com: Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant Update 7)
www-3.foo.com: 2.6.9-78.0.1.ELsmp
www-4.foo.com: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2 (Tikanga)
www-4.foo.com: 2.6.18-92.1.13.el5
www-5.foo.com: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2 (Tikanga)
www-5.foo.com: 2.6.18-92.1.13.el5
[pdurbin#beamish ~]$
You can also combine or split ghost groups, using web+db or web-RHEL4, for example.
I'll also mention that while I have never used shmux, its website contains a list of software (including gsh) that lets you run commands on many servers at once. Capistrano has already been mentioned and (from what I understand) could be on that list as well.
Take a look at Expect (man expect)
I've accomplished similar tasks in the past using Expect.
You can pipe the local script to the remote server and execute it with one command:
ssh -t user#host 'sh' < path_to_script
This can be further automated by using public key authentication and wrapping with scripts to perform parallel execution.
You can try paramiko. It's a pure-python ssh client. You can program your ssh sessions. Nothing to install on remote machines.
See this great article on how to use it.
To give you the structure, without actual code.
Use scp to copy your install/setup script to the target box.
Use ssh to invoke your script on the remote box.
pssh may be interesting since, unlike most solutions mentioned here, the commands are run in parallel.
(For my own use, I wrote a simpler small script very similar to GavinCattell's one, it is documented here - in french).
Have you looked at things like Puppet or Cfengine. They can do what you want and probably much more.
For those that stumble across this question, I'll include an answer that uses Fabric, which solves exactly the problem described above: Running arbitrary commands on multiple hosts over ssh.
Once fabric is installed, you'd create a fabfile.py, and implement tasks that can be run on your remote hosts. For example, a task to Reload Apache might look like this:
from fabric.api import env, run
env.hosts = ['host1#example.com', 'host2#example.com']
def reload():
""" Reload Apache """
run("sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload")
Then, on your local machine, run fab reload and the sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload command would get run on all the hosts specified in env.hosts.
You can do it the same way you did before, just script it instead of doing it manually. The following code remotes to machine named 'loca' and runs two commands there. What you need to do is simply insert commands you want to run there.
che#ovecka ~ $ ssh loca 'uname -a; echo something_else'
Linux loca 2.6.25.9 #1 (blahblahblah)
something_else
Then, to iterate through all the machines, do something like:
for box in box1_name box2_name box3_name
do
ssh $box 'commmands_to_run_everywhere'
done
In order to make this ssh thing work without entering passwords all the time, you'll need to set up key authentication. You can read about it at IBM developerworks.
You can run the same command on several servers at once with a tool like cluster ssh. The link is to a discussion of cluster ssh on the Debian package of the day blog.
Well, for step 1 and 2 isn't there a tomcat manager web interface; you could script that with curl or zsh with the libwww plug in.
For SSH you're looking to:
1) not get prompted for a password (use keys)
2) pass the command(s) on SSH's commandline, this is similar to rsh in a trusted network.
Other posts have shown you what to do, and I'd probably use sh too but I'd be tempted to use perl like ssh tomcatuser#server perl -e 'do-everything-on-one-line;' or you could do this:
either scp the_package.tbz tomcatuser#server:the_place/.
ssh tomcatuser#server /bin/sh <<\EOF
define stuff like TOMCAT_WEBAPPS=/usr/local/share/tomcat/webapps
tar xj the_package.tbz or rsync rsync://repository/the_package_place
mv $TOMCAT_WEBAPPS/old_war $TOMCAT_WEBAPPS/old_war.old
mv $THE_PLACE/new_war $TOMCAT_WEBAPPS/new_war
touch $TOMCAT_WEBAPPS/new_war [you don't normally have to restart tomcat]
mv $THE_PLACE/vhost_file $APACHE_VHOST_DIR/vhost_file
$APACHECTL restart [might need to login as apache user to move that file and restart]
EOF
You want DSH or distributed shell, which is used in clusters a lot. Here is the link: dsh
You basically have node groups (a file with lists of nodes in them) and you specify which node group you wish to run commands on then you would use dsh, like you would ssh to run commands on them.
dsh -a /path/to/some/command/or/script
It will run the command on all the machines at the same time and return the output prefixed with the hostname. The command or script has to be present on the system, so a shared NFS directory can be useful for these sorts of things.
Creates hostname ssh command of all machines accessed.
by Quierati
http://pastebin.com/pddEQWq2
#Use in .bashrc
#Use "HashKnownHosts no" in ~/.ssh/config or /etc/ssh/ssh_config
# If known_hosts is encrypted and delete known_hosts
[ ! -d ~/bin ] && mkdir ~/bin
for host in `cut -d, -f1 ~/.ssh/known_hosts|cut -f1 -d " "`;
do
[ ! -s ~/bin/$host ] && echo ssh $host '$*' > ~/bin/$host
done
[ -d ~/bin ] && chmod -R 700 ~/bin
export PATH=$PATH:~/bin
Ex Execute:
$for i in hostname{1..10}; do $i who;done
There is a tool called FLATT (FLexible Automation and Troubleshooting Tool) that allows you to execute scripts on multiple Unix/Linux hosts with a click of a button. It is a desktop GUI app that runs on Mac and Windows but there is also a command line java client.
You can create batch jobs and reuse on multiple hosts.
Requires Java 1.6 or higher.
Although it's a complex topic, I can highly recommend Capistrano.
I'm not sure if this method will work for everything that you want, but you can try something like this:
$ cat your_script.sh | ssh your_host bash
Which will run the script (which resides locally) on the remote server.
Just read a new blog using setsid without any further installation/configuration besides the mainstream kernel. Tested/Verified under Ubuntu14.04.
While the author has a very clear explanation and sample code as well, here's the magic part for a quick glance:
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Create a temp script to echo the SSH password, used by SSH_ASKPASS
#----------------------------------------------------------------------
SSH_ASKPASS_SCRIPT=/tmp/ssh-askpass-script
cat > ${SSH_ASKPASS_SCRIPT} <<EOL
#!/bin/bash
echo "${PASS}"
EOL
chmod u+x ${SSH_ASKPASS_SCRIPT}
# Tell SSH to read in the output of the provided script as the password.
# We still have to use setsid to eliminate access to a terminal and thus avoid
# it ignoring this and asking for a password.
export SSH_ASKPASS=${SSH_ASKPASS_SCRIPT}
......
......
# Log in to the remote server and run the above command.
# The use of setsid is a part of the machinations to stop ssh
# prompting for a password.
setsid ssh ${SSH_OPTIONS} ${USER}#${SERVER} "ls -rlt"
Easiest way I found without installing or configuring much software is using plain old tmux. Say you have 9 linux servers. Pick a box as your main. Start a tmux session:
tmux
Then create 9 split tmux panes by doing this 8 times:
ctrl-b + %
Now SSH into each box in each pane. You'll need to know some tmux shortcuts. To navigate, press:
ctrl+b <arrow-keys>
Once your logged in to all your boxes on each pane. Now turn on pane synchronization where it lets you type the same thing into each box:
ctrl+b :setw synchronize-panes on
now when you press any keys, it will show up on every pane. to turn it off, just make on to off. to cycle resize panes, press ctrl+b < space-bar >.
This works alot better for me since I need to see each terminal output as sometimes servers crash or hang for whatever reason when downloading or upgrade software. Any issues, you can just isolate and resolve individually.

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