I'd like to launch a Windows 2008 (64bits, base install) instance programmatically, kinda like clicking on the Launch Instance link & following the "Create a New Instance" wizard.
I read about this command ec2-run-instances, I tried running it on putty using this syntax:
/opt/aws/bin/ec2-run-instances ami_id ami-e5784391 -n 1
--availability-zone eu-west-1a --region eu-west-1 --instance-type m1.small --private-key /full/path/MyPrivateKey.pem --group MyRDP
but it always complain that:
Required option '-C, --cert CERT' missing (-h for usage)
According to the documentation, this option isn't required!!
Can someone tell me what's wrong anyway? I'm just trying to programmatically launch a fresh Windows install, run some tests on the clouds & shut it down after that.
The error message is correct (just try adding --cert ;) - to what documentation are you referring here?
The requirement is clearly outlined in the Microsoft Windows Guide for Amazon EC2, specifically in Task 4: Set the EC2_PRIVATE_KEY and EC2_CERT Environment Variables:
The command line tools need access to an X.509 certificate and a
corresponding private key that are associated with your account. [...]
You can either specify your credentials with the --private-key and
--cert parameters every time you issue a command or you can create environment variables that point to the credential files on your local
system. If the environment variables are properly configured, you can
omit the parameters when you issue a command.
[emphasis mine]
Maybe the option of using environment variables has been misleading somehow somewhere?
Alternative
Please note that you can ease and speed up working with EC2 considerably by using alternate scripting environments covering the same ground, in particular the excellent boto, which is a Python package that provides interfaces to Amazon Web Services.
Boto uses the nowadays more common authentication scheme based on access keys only rather than X.509 certificates (e.g. an AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID / AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY pair), which furthermore can (and should) be managed via AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to avoid the risk of exposing your main AWS account credentials in the first place. See my answer to How to download an EC2 X.509 certificate with an IAM User account? for more details on this.
Good luck!
Related
I'm trying to integrate serverless to my circleci workflow.
I tried first adding both, key and secret to AWS permissions, but that did not work.
Then, I added key and secret to Environment variables and in my config file:
sudo npm install -g serverless
sls config credentials --provider aws --key $AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID --secret $AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
sls deploy -v
But I see the same error:
Serverless Error ---------------------------------------
You are not currently logged in. Follow instructions in http://slss.io/run-in-cicd to setup env vars for authentication.
Anyone had this issue? I could not find an answer or hint online. Thanks.
This likely only applies to those trying to use Serverless Enterprise with the monitoring & dashboards they have set up. #wintvelt's answer wouldn't work for me because if i deleted the org variable, it would likely break the connection needed for Enterprise. So steps for my CircleCI setup:
In CircleCI, create a Context for each environment with the AWS Key ID and Secret as environment variables (putting them in a context is a nice to have, you could use other methods of making Circle inject environment variables into builds).
In your Serverless Framework dashboard, create a new access key which you will use in Circle.
Create a new environment variable SERVERLESS_ACCESS_KEY with the value from step 2.
I got this idea from reading how Seed.run has users integrate with Serverless. For more info read this link: https://seed.run/docs/integrating-with-serverless-enterprise.
Just checked Circleci stopped supporting AWS Permissions as a configurable option in the settings page.
You need to set the credentials as environment variables for the projects. The credentials should be named exactly AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY.
that's all you need to do. you don't have to do any additional step. I tried this on my project and it worked.
Your deployment step should simply be
sls deploy
As a follow-up to the previous answer: I had exactly the same error.
I took the solution from the chat as a solution.
For me the fixes I applied:
In CircleCI project settings, under "AWS permissions" I added the AWS Access Key ID and Secret Access key
In CircleCI project settings, under "Environment variables", I also added the AWS Access Key ID and Secret Access key
From my serverless.yml file, I deleted the line with org variable
For me, 1. and 2. alone was not enough. I also had to remove the line from my yml file to make deployment via CircleCI work.
For those landing here with the same issue, hope this helps!
Creating AMI's from EBS backed instances is exceedingly easy, but doing the same from an instance-store based instance seems like it can only be done manually using the CLI.
So far I've been able to bootstrap the creation of an 'instance-store' based server off of an HVM Amazon Linux AMI with Ansible, but I'm getting lost on the steps that follow... I'm trying to follow this: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/create-instance-store-ami.html#amazon_linux_instructions
Apparently I need to store my x.509 cert and key on the instance, but which key is that? Is that...
one I have to generate on the instance with openssl,
one that I generate/convert from AWS,
one I generate with Putty, or
one that already exists in my AWS account?
After that, I can't find any reference to ec2-bundle-vol in Ansible. So I'm left wondering if the only way to do this is with Ansible's command module.
Basically what I'm hoping to find out is: Is there a way to easily create instance-store based AMI's using Ansible, and if not, if anyone can reference the steps necessary to automate this? Thanks!
Generally speaking, Ansible AWS modules are meant to manage AWS resources by interacting with AWS HTTP API (ie. actions you could otherwise do in the AWS Management Console).
They are not intended to run AWS specific system tools on EC2 instances.
ec2-bundle-vol and ec2-upload-bundle must be run on the EC2 instance itself. It is not callable via the HTTP API.
I'm afraid you need to write a custom playbook / role to automate the process.
On the other hand, aws ec2 register-image is an AWS API call and correspond to the ec2_ami Ansible module.
Unfortunately, this module doesn't seem to support image registering from an S3 bucket.
I'm pretty new to Kubernetes and clusters so this might be very simple.
I set up a Kubernetes cluster with 5 nodes using kubeadm following this guide. I got some issues but it all worked in the end. So now I want to install the Web UI (Dashboard). To do so I need to set up authentication:
Please note, this works only if the apiserver is set up to allow authentication with username and password. This is not currently the case with the some setup tools (e.g., kubeadm). Refer to the authentication admin documentation for information on how to configure authentication manually.
So I got to read authentication page of the documentation. And I decided I want to add authentication via a Static Password File. To do so I have to append the option --basic-auth-file=SOMEFILE to the Api server.
When I do ps -aux | grep kube-apiserver this is the result, so it is already running. (which makes sense because I use it when calling kubectl)
kube-apiserver
--insecure-bind-address=127.0.0.1
--admission-control=NamespaceLifecycle,LimitRanger,ServiceAccount,PersistentVolumeLabel,DefaultStorageClass,ResourceQuota
--service-cluster-ip-range=10.96.0.0/12
--service-account-key-file=/etc/kubernetes/pki/apiserver-key.pem
--client-ca-file=/etc/kubernetes/pki/ca.pem
--tls-cert-file=/etc/kubernetes/pki/apiserver.pem
--tls-private-key-file=/etc/kubernetes/pki/apiserver-key.pem
--token-auth-file=/etc/kubernetes/pki/tokens.csv
--secure-port=6443
--allow-privileged
--advertise-address=192.168.1.137
--kubelet-preferred-address-types=InternalIP,ExternalIP,Hostname
--anonymous-auth=false
--etcd-servers=http://127.0.0.1:2379
Couple of questions I have:
So where are all these options set?
Can i just kill this process and restart it with the option I need?
Will it be started when I reboot the system?
in /etc/kubernetes/manifests is a file called kube-apiserver.json. This is a JSON file and contains all the option you can set. I've appended the --basic-auth-file=SOMEFILE and rebooted the system (right after the change of the file kubectl wasn't working anymore and the API was shutdown)
After a reboot the whole system was working again.
Update
I didn't manage to run the dashboard using this. What I did in the end was installing the dashboard on the cluster. copying the keys from the master node (/etc/kubernetes/admin.conf) to my laptop and did kubectl proxy to proxy the traffic of the dashboard to my local machine. Now I can access it on my laptop through 127.0.0.1:8001/ui
I just found this for a similar use case and the API server was crashing after adding an Option with a file path.
I was able to solve it and maybe this helps others as well:
As described in https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/setup-tools/kubeadm/implementation-details/#constants-and-well-known-values-and-paths the files in /etc/kubernetes/manifests are static pod definitions. Therefore container rules apply.
So if you add an option with a file path, make sure you make it available to the pod with a hostPath volume.
As anyone who has ever had the misfortune of having to interact with the panoply of Google CLI binaries programmatically will have realised, authenticating with the likes of gcloud, gsutil, bq, etc. is far from intuitive or trivial, especially when you need to work across different projects.
I am running various cron jobs that interact with Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery for different projects. Since the cron jobs may overlap, renaming config files is clearly not an option, and nor would any sane person take that approach.
There must surely be some sort of method of passing a path to a service account's key pair file to these CLI binaries, but bq help yields nothing.
The Google documentation, while verbose, is largely useless, taking one on a tour of how OAuth2 works, etc, instead of explaining what must surely be a very common requirement, vis-a-vis, how to actually authenticate a service account without running commands that modify central config files.
Can any enlightened being tell me whether the engineers at Google decided to add a feature as simple as passing the path to a service account's key pair file to the likes of gsutil and bq? Or perhaps I could simply export some variable so they know which key pair file to use for authentication?
I realise these simplistic approaches may be an insult to the intelligence, but we aren't concerning ourselves with harnessing nuclear fusion, so we needn't even consider what Amazon got so right with their approach to authentication in comparison...
Configuration in the Cloud SDK is global for the user, but you can specify what aspects of that config to use on a per command basis. To accomplish what you are trying to do you can:
gcloud auth activate-service-account foo#developer.gserviceaccount.com --key-file ...
gcloud auth activate-service-account bar#developer.gserviceaccount.com --key-file ...
At this point, both sets of credentials are in your global credentials store.
Now you can run:
gcloud --account foo#developer.gserviceaccount.com some-command
gcloud --account bar#developer.gserviceaccount.com some-command
in parallel, and each will use the given account without interfering.
A larger extension of this is 'configurations' which do the same thing, but for your entire set of config (including settings like account and project).
# Create first configuration
gcloud config configurations create myconfig
gcloud config configurations activate myconfig
gcloud config set account foo#developer.gserviceaccount.com
gcloud config set project foo
# Create second configuration
gcloud config configurations create anotherconfig
gcloud config configurations activate anotherconfig
gcloud config set account bar#developer.gserviceaccount.com
gcloud config set project bar
And you can say which configuration to use on a per command basis.
gcloud --configuration myconfig some-command
gcloud --configuration anotherconfig some-command
You can read more about configurations by running: gcloud topic configurations
All properties have corresponding environment variables that allow you to set that particular property for a single command invocation or for a terminal session. They take the form:
CLOUDSDK_<SECTION>_<PROPERTY>
for example: CLOUDSDK_CORE_ACCOUNT
You can see all the available config settings by running: gcloud help config
The equivalent of the --configuration flag is: CLOUDSDK_ACTIVE_CONFIG_NAME
If you really want complete isolation, you can also change the Cloud SDK's config directory by setting CLOUDSDK_CONFIG to a directory of your choosing. Note that if you do this, the config is completely separate including the credential store, all configurations, logs, etc.
What I would do is using Putty (or other solution) on Windows to connect to a SAN switch and get results from a command with ssh.
I use Powershell as scripting language and it could be done easily but i don't want to save the password in the script.
I'm looking for a solution to use Putty from command line and set the password not stored in clear in the script.
What I thought is to launch the script with \RUNAS (through a Scheduled task) and pass the actual credentials directly to Putty. (The switch would have the same password as the account used with the Runas). Is that possible?
Or is there any solution using putty with a certificate or something like this?
You may want to consider using key authentication as opposed to a password.
People will say use a password in addition to the key, but if your alternative is storing the password on your PC in a file anyway, someone with access to your machine owns you in either case.. So you just need to generate the keys. The requirement is: no-one but you has access to that key file.
http://www.linuxproblem.org/art_9.html
I'm in the same boat, have to use Windows, but for me www.mingw.org which gives you a shell, and the basic *nix tools - extremely useful for SSH, connect to remote Linux VPS, etc.. Cygwin, of course which is similar, and has an easier tool (setup.exe if I recall) to install new apps. I actually use git-bash with is mingw with git. No-GUIs. I've found this easy to just drop to the mingw shell when I need to use ssh openssl cut awk etc..
So running any remote command using SSH from the command line without third-party programs like Putty, or those with GUIs, etc.. Using the key authentication and offing password auth completely in ssh on the remote device (at least on devices where you have control) is some additional lockdown for the remote device, especially if you're the only one need access it.
Which leaves, scheduling the script. There should be a way to do that via batch file and Windows or within the command line environment.
I'll suggest following options:
use password authentication. Store the text file with password in a file with limited access (some service account) and launch your script under this account's credentials
same as above, but instead of text file use certificate file
write a small program (C#) which uses DPAPI to store the certificate or password in service account-specific store.
combine any of the above with the use of BitLocker/EFS
No options are can protect you from an attacker having admin access to the server, but implementing them will give an increasing (in order of number) headache to someone who will be trying to break it.
The script will be a weak spot in any case, though.
This is probably not the answer you're looking for, but I wouldn't use Putty for this, and would rather communicate with the SSH server directly using SSH.NET library. It's available in both source and binary form, and you could use it from PowerShell too if you like.
Examples: http://sshnet.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Draft%20for%20Documentation%20page.
Then you'd have a lot of options to store your login credentials securely.
I recommend setting up 2-factor authentication on the ssh machine that you have to communicate with IF you can't use key authentication.
Google's 2 factor authentication can be implemented for ssh and is relatively easy to set up as long as SE linux is disabled...if it isn't disabled, you can add an exception and that would essentially help reduce the risk of compromise and increase security.