Timeout Problem with Ruby Fog when bootstrapping AWS servers - ruby

Question

I've been trying for a little while now to provision a small instance on AWS with the fog library. I've been somewhat successful (in that an instance does spool up when I run this code), but I keep getting timeout errors during the SSH portion, and when I dug deeper I found that they're consistently "AuthentitcationFailed" problems.
The failing code is as follows:
require 'rubygems'
require "fog"
connection = Fog::Compute.new({
provider: "AWS",
aws_secret_access_key: SECRET_KEY,
aws_access_key_id: ACCESS_KEY
})
server = connection.servers.bootstrap({
private_key_path: "~/.ssh/id_rsa",
public_key_path: "~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub",
username: "ubuntu"
})
Much reading has told me that sometimes this is just because the instance takes too long to spool up, but this is very consistent (it happens every time I try it). Does anyone see what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

I had the same problem some days ago and actually found the problem for my case and submitted it to the Fog issue tracker.
A colleague of mine was using connection.bootstrap() with the same AWS credentials but different SSH keys. So the "fog_default" public key had already been registered and the attempt to log in with my key pair failed.
If you're experiencing similar problems, check with connection.key_pairs.get('fog_default') if fog_default was registered before.
If this is actually the case, you have three options to get around this problem:
Delete the fog_default by running: connection.key_pairs.get('fog_default').destroy and register your new public key via bootstrap()
Manually register your custom key under a custom name
Set Fog.credential to a custom name so bootstrap() uses this name instead of "default" to register your public key
Solution two looks like this:
Fog.credentials = Fog.credentials.merge({
:private_key_path => "./keys/my_custom_key",
:public_key_path => "./keys/my_custom_key.pub"
})
if connection.key_pairs.get('my_custom_key').nil?
public_key = IO.read('./keys/my_custom_key.pub')
connection.import_key_pair('my_custom_key', public_key)
end
server = connection.servers.bootstrap(
:key_name => 'my_custom_key',
...
)
Solution three, which I prefer because the only change I need to make is to set Fog.credential, looks like this:
Fog.credential = :my_custom_key
connection.servers.bootstrap(
:private_key_path => './keys/my_custom_key',
:public_key_path => './keys/my_custom_key.pub',
...
)

Answer 2

I'd recommend a few things to diagnose the problem (if you're still having it)
Check your security groups to make sure port 22 is open to your IP / the world (0.0.0.0/0)
Try connecting manually using SSH
If you still see issues, try
ssh -v -v <normal options>
This will give you more information on what is happening when trying to connect to the instance.