AWS launches EC2 serial console to help system and network administrators improve productivity
AWS recently introduced the EC2 Serial Console, a tool for setting up serial connections for EC2 instances and troubleshooting startup and network connectivity issues. The new features are designed to help system and network administrators address productivity issues.
AWS Global technology evangelist Julien Simon explains how it works and its key benefits:
“Without any working network configuration, you can connect to instances using a browser-based shell in the AWS administrative console or using SSH to connect to a managed console server; There is no need to run the SSHD server on the instance, the only requirement is that the root account has been assigned a password, because that is the password you will use to log in. You can then type commands as if you were using a keyboard and monitor directly connected to a serial port of the instance.”
AWS recently introduced the EC2 Serial Console, a tool for setting up serial connections for EC2 instances and troubleshooting startup and network connectivity issues.
The new features are designed to help system and network administrators solve production problems. AWS Global technology evangelist Julien Simon explains how it works and its key benefits.
Without any working network configuration, you can connect to instances using a browser-based shell in the AWS administrative console or using SSH to connect to the managed console server. There is no need to run the SSHD server on the instance; The only requirement is that the root account has been assigned a password, because that’s the password you use to log in. You can then type commands as if you were using a keyboard and monitor directly connected to a serial port of the instance.
With the EC2 serial console, specific programs of the operating system, such as the Magic SysRq command on Linux, can be triggered to generate crash dumps or kill processes. On Windows, it can interrupt the startup process and start in safe mode using the Emergency Management service and special management console.
- Source: aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/t…
You can use the EC2 console or AWS CLI to provide the serial console for free. By default, the serial console is disabled and an IAM policy needs to be configured. Serial console access can be fine-grained controlled by using instance ids and resource labels. There are four levels of access: organization level, denial of access to specific member accounts using service control policies (SCP), instance level, IAM user level and operating system level, and user passwords set at guest operating system level.
Colm MacCarthaigh, an AWS engineer, tweeted:
“I’ve locked myself out of EC2 instances too many times dreaming up weird network experiments and weird kernels. I have a little script for rolling my root volume back! But not anymore… I can log in through the serial console now, just like it was in 1980.”
Not every developer is impressed with this new feature, with some commenting that only a few customers will need it, and that’s a jump from the past:
“Can we connect the modem to the dial line next? (Virtual, of course)”
“Asked Nik Weidenbacher, while another user added on Twitter.
“What Fortune 500 company hasn’t lost a ton of data because it couldn’t connect to its servers? That’s probably the only reason to build this feature.”
AWS isn’t the first cloud provider to support serial connectivity between systems and network administrators. Google Cloud Platform lets customers interact with serial consoles, and Azure introduced virtual machine serial consoles in 2018.
EC2 serial console access] (docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/late… EC2 instance of Nitro system. It supports all major Linux distributions, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Windows, and VMWare.
AWS Introduces EC2 Serial Console: Troubleshoot Boot and Networking Issues