How to configure direct http access to EC2 instance? - amazon-ec2

This is a very basic Amazon EC2 question, but I'm stumped so here goes.
I want to launch an Amazon EC2 instance and allow access to HTTP on ports 80 and 8888
from anywhere. So far I can't even allow the instance to connect to on those ports using
its own IP address (but it will connect to localhost).
I configured the "default" security group for HTTP using the standard HTTP option on the management console (and also SSH).
I launched my instance in the default security group.
I connected to the instance on SSH port 22 twice and in one window launch an HTTP server
on port 80. In the other window I verify that I can connect to HTTP using the "localhost".
However when I try to access HTTP from the instance (or anywhere else) using either the public DNS or the Private IP address I het "connection refused".
What am I doing wrong, please?
Below is a console fragment showing the wget that succeeds and the two that fail run from the instance itself.
--2012-03-07 15:43:31-- http://localhost/
Resolving localhost... 127.0.0.1
Connecting to localhost|127.0.0.1|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Moved Temporarily
Location: /__whiff_directory_listing__ [following]
--2012-03-07 15:43:31-- http://localhost/__whiff_directory_listing__
Connecting to localhost|127.0.0.1|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Saving to: “__whiff_directory_listing__”
[ <=>
] 7,512 --.-K/s in 0.03s
2012-03-07 15:43:31 (263 KB/s) - “__whiff_directory_listing__” saved [7512]
[ec2-user#ip-10-195-205-30 tmp]$ wget http://ec2-50-17-2-174.compute-1.amazonaws.com/
--2012-03-07 15:44:17-- http://ec2-50-17-2-174.compute-1.amazonaws.com/
Resolving ec2-50-17-2-174.compute-1.amazonaws.com... 10.195.205.30
Connecting to ec2-50-17-2-174.compute-1.amazonaws.com|10.195.205.30|:80... failed:
Connection refused.
[ec2-user#ip-10-195-205-30 tmp]$ wget http://10.195.205.30/
--2012-03-07 15:46:08-- http://10.195.205.30/
Connecting to 10.195.205.30:80... failed: Connection refused.
[ec2-user#ip-10-195-205-30 tmp]$

The standard tcp sockets interface requires that you bind to a particular IP address when you send or listen. There are a couple of somewhat special addresses: localhost (which you're probably familiar with) which is 127.0.0.1. There's also a special address, 0.0.0.0 or INADDR_ANY (internet protocol, special shorthand for ANY ADDRESS). It's a way to listen on ANY or more commonly, ALL addresses on the host. This is a way to tell the kernel/stack that you're not interested in a particular IP address.
So, when you're setting up a server that listens to "localhost" you're telling the service that you want to use the special reserved address that can only be reached by users of this host, and while it exists on every host, making a connection to localhost will only ever reach the host you're making the request from.
When you want a service to be reachable everywhere (on a local host, on all interfaces, etc.) you can specify 0.0.0.0.

(0) It's silly but the first thing you need to do is to make sure that your web server is running.
(1) You need to edit your Security Group to let incoming HTTP packets access your website. If your website is listening on port 80, you need to edit the Security Group to open access to port 80 as mentioned above. If your website is listening on some other port, then you need to edit the Security Group to access that other port.
(2) If you are running a Linux instance, the iptables firewall may be running by default. You can check that this firewall is active by running
sudo service iptables status
on the command line. If you get output, then the iptables firewall is running. If you get a message "Firewall not running", that's pretty self-explanatory. In general, the iptables firewall is running by default.
You have two options: knock out the firewall or edit the firewall's configuration to let HTTP traffic through. I opted to knock out the firewall as the simpler option (for me).
sudo service iptables stop
There is no real security risk in shutting down iptables because iptables, if active, merely duplicates the functionality of Amazon's firewall, which is using the Security Group to generate its configuration file. We are assuming here that Amazon AWS doesn't misconfigure its firewalls - a very safe assumption.
(3) Now, you can access the URL from your browser.
(4) The Microsoft Windows Servers also run their personal firewalls by default and you'll need to fix the Windows Server's personal firewall, too.
Correction: by AWS default, AWS does not fire up server firewalls such iptables (Centos) or UAF (Ubuntu) when you are ordering the creation of new EC2 instances - That's why EC2 instances that are in the same VPC can ssh into each other and you can "see" the web server that you fired up from another EC2 instance in the same VPC.
Just make sure that your RESTful API is listening on all interfaces i.e. 0.0.0.0:portID

As you are getting connection refused (packets are being rejected) I bet it is iptables causing the problem. Try to run
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 8888 -j ACCEPT
and test the connection.
You will also need to add those rules permanently which you can do by adding the above lines into ie. /etc/sysconfig/iptables if you are running Red Hat.

Apparently I was "binding to localhost" whereas I needed to bind to 0.0.0.0 to respond to port 80 for the all incoming TCP interfaces (?). This is a subtlety of TCP/IP that I don't fully understand yet, but it fixed the problem.

Had to do the following:
1) Enable HTTP access on the instance config, it wasn't on by default only SSH
2) Tried to do nodejs server, so port was bound to 80 -> 3000 did the following commands to fix that
iptables -F
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
sudo service iptables-persistent flush

Amazon support answered it and it worked instantly:
I replicated the issue on my end on a test Ubuntu instance and was able to solve it. The issue was that in order to run Tomcat on a port below 1024 in Ubuntu/Unix, the service needs root privileges which is generally not recommended as running a process on port 80 with root privileges is an unnecessary security risk.
What we recommend is to use a port redirection via iptables :-
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080
I hope the above information helps.

Related

Enable remote access from one custom IP to Elasticsearch cluster

I've a VPS with installed Elasticsearch. the question is how it will be possible to connect this remote machine with my home IP? I know that with simple line possible to allow all connections, but it is not secure. When I try to add my custom IP, the ES is closed localhost connection and doesn't start properly.
Thank you in any advice!
First set network.host in elasticsearch.yml to the VPS public IP address, not localhost. Next you would need to open port 9200 (or whichever you are using) to you home computers specific IP address. So assuming your VPS is Linux you would achieve this by whitelisting your IP address in Iptables and opening this port to that IP address only.
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -s <source> --dport 9200 -j ACCEPT
As to how secure this would be. In general the recommendations I've seen floating around are mostly agreeing on the fact that it's a good idea to only allow local connections to your elasticsearch instance. If you want to try allowing remote connections for testing purposes, then as I've mentioned it is enough to bind your public IP instead of localhost in elasticsearch.yml and opening the appropriate ports.
Thank you for etarhan again. One important thing, please check your iptables (firewall) rules before production for opening port for any external IPs. If they allow any remote connection anybody can update, delete your elasticsearch clusters. I solved it by following above instruction, opened remote connection to my home IP but closed any others:
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -s <source --dport 9200 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 9200 -j DROP

I can't connect a webpage on my ec2

I am building simple webpage.
I could run on my local host.
I made ec2 instance, I opened ports 22, 8000.
I could connect with ssh and run server for webpage,
but I get this error
this is my github address that contain the code.
enter link description herehttps://github.com/MoreNiceJay/django2
In your security group rules, open port 80
This is the standard port for http traffic
Other things to check: login to the host with ssh and use netstat |grep LISTEN to see if there is a process listening on port 80

Can't connect to public IP for EC2 instance

I have an EC2 instance which is running with the following security groups:
HTTP - TCP - 80 - 0.0.0.0/0
Custom UDP Rule - UDP - 1194 - 0.0.0.0/0
SSH - TCP - 22 - 0.0.0.0/0
Custom TCP Rule - TCP - 943 - 0.0.0.0/0
HTTPS - TCP - 443 - 0.0.0.0/0
However, when I try to access http://{PUBLIC_IP} or https://{PUBLIC_IP} in the browser, I get a "{IP} refused to connect" error. I'm new to AWS. Am I missing something here? What should I do to debug?
One way to debug this particular class of problem is to use netcat in order to determine where the problem lies.
If you run netcat against port 80 on the public IP address of your instance and just get a hang (no output at all), then most likely your security group isn't allowing traffic through. Here is an example from an EC2 instance that is in a security group that doesn't allow port 80 traffic inbound:
% nc -v 55.35.300.45 80
<just hangs>
Whereas if the security group is changed to allow port 80, but the EC2 instance doesn't have any process listening on port 80, you'll get the following:
% nc -v 55.35.300.45 80
nc: connectx to 52.38.300.43 port 80 (tcp) failed: Connection refused
Given that your browser gave you a similar "connection refused", most likely the problem is that there is no web server running on your instance. You can verify this by ssh'ing into the instance and seeing if you can connect to port 80 there:
ssh ec2-user#55.35.300.45
% nc -v localhost 80
nc: connect to localhost port 80 (tcp) failed: Connection refused
If you get something like the above, you're definitely not running a webserver.
I'm not sure if it's too late to help but I was stuck with a similar issue with my test server
SG Inbound: ssh -> 22
HTTP -> 80
NACL: default allow/deny settings
but still couldn't ping to the server from my browser, then I realize there's nothing running on the server that can serve the request, and I started httpd server (webserver) and it worked.
sudo yum -y install httpd
sudo service httpd start
this way you can test the connectivity if you are playing with SGs and NACLs and of course it's not the only way, just an example if you're figuring your System N/W out.
Have you installed webserver(ngingx/apache) to serve your requests. If so please share your the config files. (So that it will help to troubleshoot)
I think the reason is probably that you did not set up a web server for your EC2 instance, because if you try to access http://{PUBLIC_IP} or https://{PUBLIC_IP}, you need to have a background server to serve the http request as #Niranj Rajasekaran said.
By the way, by simply pinging the {PUBLIC_IP}, you could see if your connection to your EC2 instance is normal or not.
In command prompt or terminal, type
ping {PUBLIC_IP}
In my case, the server was running but available on just 127.0.0.1 so it refused connections from external hosts. To see if this is your situation, you can run
netstat -an | grep <port number>
If it says 127.0.0.1:<port number> instead of 0.0.0.0:<port number>, you have this problem.
Usually there's a flag or an argument in your server code somewhere to set the host to 0.0.0.0:
app.run(host='0.0.0.0') # flask example
However, in my case, I had already set this so I thought that couldn't possibly be the issue, which is how I ended up on this thread, which asks more generally about the problem. Unfortunately, I was using docker, and had set 0.0.0.0 on the container but was mapping that explicitly to 127.0.0.1 on the host in the docker-compose port-mapping:
ports:
- "127.0.0.1:<port number>:<port number>"
Changing that line to remove the host IP specification fixed the problem upon re-deploy:
ports:
- "<port number>:<port number>"

How to add HTTP proxy ( with credential ) into SSH command on Mac

I was using putty SSH to tunnel out ( from office network ) to our VM on public cloud when I was using Windows. In Putty, I can specify proxy with HTTP and specify user name and password ( our proxy need password).
Now I change my work to Mac, but when I try to tunnel by SSH to outside, since Mac don't have putty, I can only find default SSH command on Mac. When I try to specify SSH proxy on Mac SSH command. I could't find any useful example about how to do it. Is any body have experience on that?
Thanks,
Xinsong
Manual pages are your friends. There is -D switch for ssh command:
-D [bind_address:]port
Specifies a local “dynamic” application-level port forwarding. This works by allocating a socket to listen to port on the local side, optionally bound to the specified bind_address. Whenever a connection is made to this port, the connection is forwarded over the secure channel, and the application protocol is then used to determine where to connect to from the remote machine. Currently the SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 protocols are supported, and ssh will act as a SOCKS server. Only root can forward privileged ports. Dynamic port forwardings can also be specified in the configuration file.
IPv6 addresses can be specified by enclosing the address in square brackets. Only the superuser can forward privileged ports. By default, the local port is bound in accordance with the GatewayPorts setting. However, an explicit bind_address may be used to bind the connection to a specific address. The bind_address of “localhost” indicates that the listening port be bound for local use only, while an empty address or ‘*’ indicates that the port should be available from all interfaces.

How to open incoming port 50070 in firewall (google compute engine)

I have my Single node Hadoop installed on Google Compute Engine instance and i want to open port 50070 on that machine to access the hadoop dashboard. i configured in the firewall rule as tcp:50070 in compute engine networks. but still i am unable to access my port outside the network (ie . via internet). I tried nmap for the public ip of my GCE instance and i got a result which has only ssh port got opened all other ports are filtered .
Note: i am using debian 7.5 image
Make sure your daemon is listening on port 50070. If you have more than one networks in you project make sure the port is opened on the right network. You can run the following commands to check the information about your instance and network.
lsof -i
gcutil --project= getinstance
gcutil --project= listnetworks
gcutil --project= listfirewalls
gcutil --project= getfirewall
Check if IP/Port is allowed in iptables or not.
iptables -L
would show you all the records.
To allow port in iptables you can do the following:
sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 50070 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables-save -c
Short answer
In addition to configure the firewall rule at GCE web console make sure that your server is listening at 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1
Long answer
In the context of servers, 0.0.0.0 means all IPv4 addresses on the local machine. If a host has two IP addresses, 192.168.1.1 and 10.1.2.1, and a server running on the host listens on 0.0.0.0, it will be reachable at both of those IPs - Source
In contrast 127.0.0.1 is the IP address used to stablish a connection to the same machine used by the user this address is usually referred as the localhost.
It's often used when you want a network-capable application to only serve clients on the same host. A process that is listening on 127.0.0.1 for connections will only receive local connections on that socket. - Source
Hence, if you try to stablish a connection to your server from internet and your server is listening at 127.0.0.1 at your GCE machine, then, from the server point of view a request has never been received and as a consequence Goocle Cloud Firewall will refuse the connection because there is no server listening at the opened port (in your case 50070).
I hope this answer helps to solve your problem. Best regards.

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