Create EBS Boot AMI

Great guide!
This got it working for me.
Made a standard ubuntu intrepid ami based on ebs

Hi, nice update, you might want to update your link to the instance-to-ebs-ami.sh script, http://gist.github.com/249915?file=instance-to-ebs-ami.sh There have been a few updates to the script. The link you have is to a specific, earlier version

Hi Michael,

Thanks for pointing to updated version and of course thank you for your Create EBS Boot AMI scripts.

Youri,

Great that it work for you. As pointed by Michael, I’ve updated the new instance-to-ebs-ami.sh.

Thanks for a clear and concise writeup. My question is – what does one do when there is no identified ARI associated with a particular AMI that we are using?

Rodney, is this correct? It seems you are downloading bundle-to-ebs.sh but saving as /tmp/instance-to-ebs-ami.sh ? Should you instead download instance-to-ebs-ami.sh?
Cheers

Hi Radek,

Thanks for pointing that out. Seems my update changed the link. Fixed.

Rodney

Hey Rodney, thanks a lot! I managed to create the EBS bootable image thanks to your post! I based it on offical canonical ubuntu-hardy-9.10-i386. One thing which is kind of weird is that whenever I terminate the instance the EBS volume attached to that instance is deleted as well… Do you have any idea why this may be happening?

Hi Michael,

You might be using a kernel that does not require ramdisk.
See this post for reference:
Thread: What is the point of the ArI images?
2.6.18 Xen 3.1.0 kernel

Radek,

On EBS AMI, if you terminate the instance it will delete the volume. If you want to make a point in time copy of your EBS AMI, you can stop it using AWS Management console and use Create Image(EBS AMI). Or just create a new snapshot of the volume then you can register it using the command line tools.

Rodney

As posted here by Ton:
http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu/browse_thread/thread/11b9c0ff3e477a53

Hi Rodney,

After a small change Michael’s scripts worked fine for me in eu-west
zone. The ec2- commands in the script did not have the –region
directive set. In that case they default to ‘us-east-1′, so the script
works out-of-the-box for all people in that region, but in other
regions like ‘eu-west-1′ and ‘us-west-1′ the –region directive must
be explicitly set to that region.

Best regards, Ton

Radek,

Please check the deleteOnTerminate attribute when you run the instance. This will not delete the volumes as describe on the BootFromEBSGuide manual.

Michael,

I’ve built multiple EBS based AMI’s all working great!
But i think I’ve found some minor security issues.
The script doesn’t exclude the authorization_keys found in .ssh which get created on instance initialization.
Also, the file ec2-init-user-data gets chmodded.
But the same file could be named ec2-init like i found on other distributions, so you should check it manually after mounting the volume.

Hope this helps a bit

When I run the following command (filling in my info where appropriate) I just get the help menu for the command. Does anyone see anything wrong? I’m not the most advanced command line person but everything else seemed to go fine.

ec2-register –snapshot snap-c070c5a9 –kernel aki-92ba58fb –ramdisk ari-94ba58fd –description=”EBS Ubuntu Hardy” –name=”–name=”ebs-ubuntu-hardy-8.04-i386-server-20091130″” –architecture i386 –root-device-name /dev/sda1

Ron,

It seems your command contains “-name” twice. Please recheck and let us know how it goes.

Good luck.

Ron – also it could be that you’re running the old version of the ec2 tools without support for boot from EBS.

I’ve tried this over and over again, I’ve got my volume and snapshot dialed, i can’t register the ami from it, whenever I run

ec2-register –snapshot snap-98bb4cf1 –kernel aki-7e0d250a –ramdisk ari-7d0d2509 –description=”my image” –name=”gentoo-stage3″ –architecture i386 –root-device-name /dev/sda1 –region eu-west-1

I get ec2reg/ec2-register usage information, no debugging info, no sign of success or reason of failure… it simply won’t work…

I’ve tried everything, including:

ec2-cmd RegisterImage -n my_image -s snap-98bb4cf1

Thanks for your response. So I took out the double name and ran this. I’ve looked at a lot of examples and tried some of them but…same result. This makes sense anyway. All of the other commands went well so I think my environment is good. Do I need an s3 bucket for this? Do I need to include a manifest? I’ve included the response output. Thanks for your help.

ec2-register –snapshot snap-6db3f004 –kernel aki-5f15f636 –ramdisk ari-0915f660 –description=”ebs based ami” –name=”abc-ami-ebs1″ –architecture i386 –root-device-name /dev/sda1 –region us-east-1d
SYNOPSIS
ec2reg (ec2-register)
ec2reg [GENERAL OPTIONS] MANIFEST
GENERAL NOTES
Any command option/parameter may be passed a value of ‘-’ to indicate
that values for that option should be read from stdin.
DESCRIPTION
Register an AMI manifest for use with EC2.
The MANIFEST parameter is the manifest (in S3) to register.
e.g. mybucketname/image.manifest

GENERAL OPTIONS

-K, –private-key KEY
Specify KEY as the private key to use. Defaults to the value of the
EC2_PRIVATE_KEY environment variable (if set). Overrides the default.

-C, –cert CERT
Specify CERT as the X509 certificate to use. Defaults to the value
of the EC2_CERT environment variable (if set). Overrides the default.

-U, –url URL
Specify URL as the web service URL to use. Defaults to the value of
‘https://ec2.amazonaws.com’ or to that of the EC2_URL environment
variable (if set). Overrides the default.

–region REGION
Specify REGION as the web service region to use.
This option will override the URL specified by the “-U URL” option and EC2_URL environment variable.

-v, –verbose
Verbose output.

-?, –help
Display this help.

-H, –headers
Display column headers.

–debug
Display additional debugging information.

–show-empty-fields
Indicate empty fields.

–connection-timeout TIMEOUT
Specify a connection timeout TIMEOUT (in seconds).

–request-timeout TIMEOUT
Specify a request timeout TIMEOUT (in seconds).

Rares,

Please run the command to check the ec2 tools version you have on your machines. It might be older version without support to EBS boot images as Mark stated above.

You can download the updated API tools here http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip

Hey you may be right.
When I run: ec2-version
I get: 1.3-36506 2009-04-04

I downloaded the latest (46266) and put it in /usr/local/ec2-api-tools-1.3-46266. I made that its home.If I run:
$EC2_HOME/bin/ec2-version

I get: 1.3-46266 2009-11-30

As I am just moving to Linux and trying to remember Unix commands from yesteryear I may be doing this wrong. Did I not install the latest ec2 api tools properly? Thanks…

All I needed was a nudge in the right direction. Worked great without the user malfunctions. Thanks….

Great article, helped plenty in moving images to EBS.

Some gotcha’s I faced: firstly the links to the script seemed to miss the instance-to-ebs (only grabbed the bundle-to-ebs). The rsync should also have –exclude=”exclude” with the inverts, otherwise get a nice mess in the target. also exclude “/sys/*”

Before the ec2-register phase, you need to wait for the snapshot to complete. You can hang around and watch, or stick it in:
while ! ec2-describe-snapshots $SNAP | grep -q completed; do
echo “Snapshot is `ec2-describe-snapshots $SNAP | awk ‘{print $6}’` complete”
done

Hi Brett,

Thanks for pointing that out.:)

Thanks for the quick rundown! Worked like a charm. Just wanted to clarify a point made above, which is that there are two typos in this line:

ec2-register –snapshot snap-c070c5a9 –kernel aki-92ba58fb –ramdisk ari-94ba58fd –description=”EBS Ubuntu Hardy” –name=”–name=”ebs-ubuntu-hardy-8.04-i386-server-20091130″” –architecture i386 –root-device-name /dev/sda1

The first is the ‘–name=”–name’ thing, and the second is that for –name and –description, you shouldn’t use equal signs, I don’t think. Anyway, thank you!

Thanks Jonah. Fixed.

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