"Accessing your serial console is only 0.04$/per character, except if you bid on peak console then ..."
I made that up, but it would totally not surprise anyone, would it?
EC2 Serial Console
31–40 of 121 posts
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#32"Accessing your serial console is only 0.04$/per character, except if you bid on peak console then ..." I made that up, but it would totally not surprise anyone, would it?
I did certifications and couldn't believe that it wasn't $5/missed question the first time around :D
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#33This is super useful if you are in the game of building images, or highly tweeking init systems and/or the kernel. For general consumers, not much value IMHO.
I see a ton of value when you have instances on a private network with no shell access and want to debug them without setting up a bastion instance.
Yep, this might very well enable whole deployments where there is no SSH access anywhere.
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#34I suppose this isn't much of a surprise, but it's kinda sorta pointless for Windows instances. I was hoping it would be something, but it's just a dump of the standard Windows system log output. And adding to the fun, watching it on an initial instance bootup seems to block the process AWS uses to grab the encrypted password out of the log. So, it's not useful, and makes the instance a bit hard to remote into.
You can enable the SAC for Windows. Then, you can have a command prompt too over serial.
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#35This seems to be such an obvious feature that I'm surprised they are only adding this now. I'm not an expert in hypervisors or anything like that and so I'm wondering what was stopping them from adding it in the past?
I get this sense they are very conservative in their feature set there? Nested VMs for example are supposed in GCP, Azure and Oracle clouds I think, but not AWS. VM migration too I think exists in GCP at least, but not AWS. It's interesting.
AWS is super slow to deprecate or remove features and services.
A few people were noting that SimpleDB has been deprecated, it's not listed in the AWS web console, you can't find docs for it anymore, but if you have a running instance, your service API calls still work. And I think there have been many deprecation warnings since, plus migration messages. But they don't want to break existing clients.
I'm guessing this is a similar case where they want to be really, really sure that it's worth offering the service.
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#36This seems to be such an obvious feature that I'm surprised they are only adding this now. I'm not an expert in hypervisors or anything like that and so I'm wondering what was stopping them from adding it in the past?
Perhaps patents in HP's iLO system?
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#37I suppose this isn't much of a surprise, but it's kinda sorta pointless for Windows instances. I was hoping it would be something, but it's just a dump of the standard Windows system log output. And adding to the fun, watching it on an initial instance bootup seems to block the process AWS uses to grab the encrypted password out of the log. So, it's not useful, and makes the instance a bit hard to remote into.
You can enable the SAC for Windows. Then, you can have a command prompt too over serial.
Fair enough, found the documentation:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/troub...
It does require connecting to the working instance first and setting things up, which is less than ideal, but I get why it's the case. I guess I'm off to configure the Windows instances I care about, so I have a way to troubleshoot things in the future.
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get this sense they are very conservative in their feature set there? Nested VMs for example are supposed in GCP, Azure and Oracle clouds I think, but not AWS. VM migration too I think exists in GCP at least, but not AWS. It's interesting.
AWS is super slow to deprecate or remove features and services. A few people were noting that SimpleDB has been deprecated, it's not listed in the AWS web console, you can't find docs for it anymore, but if you have a running instance, your service API calls still work. And I think there have been many deprecation warnings since, plus migration messages. But they don't want to break existing clients. I'm guessing thi…
> ...you can't find docs for it anymore
Here are the docs: https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS is super slow to deprecate or remove features and services. A few people were noting that SimpleDB has been deprecated, it's not listed in the AWS web console, you can't find docs for it anymore, but if you have a running instance, your service API calls still work. And I think there have been many deprecation warnings since, plus migration messages. But they don't want to break existing clients. I'm guessing thi…
> ...you can't find docs for it anymore Here are the docs: https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/
Ah, my bad. But the service is no longer listed in the AWS Console menus.
Re: EC2 Serial Console
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
if you have serial console access, can't you key-combo it to boot into single user mode?
Not by default as far as I'm aware. Though, it's been a long time since I've used a desktop Linux distribution. My experience is mostly with serial access for servers--Linux, BSD, and Solaris. I much prefer serial ports for backup administrative access as there's little chance of a misconfiguration. Whereas w/ port failover and other IPMI, BMC, etc non-sense if you disconnect the ethernet cable from the dedicated net…
once upon a time in another life it seems like, we had a modem hooked to a serial multiplexer in the "core room" in the library, and I swear once I used that to reboot a solaris machine to single user mode, but I probably telnet'ed in (this was before ssh) and then did the init 1 or whatever and then dialed in to the serial multiplexer.