Beware: certain Amazon EC2 AMI’s terminate at shutdown
I toyed with Amazon EC2 last year by migrating my web server there. After issuing shutdown -P
in Ubuntu last week, my instance disappeared from the list in the AWS dashboard. I seeked help and found out that some AMI's are set to terminate at shutdown. Unfortunately, the AMI I used was one of them. Files and settings are not recoverable after an instance is terminated. Luckily, I transferred most of my critical information out prior to the shutdown; I'm only missing one file. Note to self: for all future instances, the shutdown behavior to stop
(as opposed to terminate
) could be modified per these instructions. First, create and download the X.509 certificate and private key. To access the EC2 api, do the following on your computer:
sudo apt-get install ec2-api-tools ec2-ami-tools ##ec2-init
Then, do the following to find out what behavior is currently set on your instance:
ec2-describe-instance-attribute i-AMAZON-INSTANCE-ID --instance-initiated-shutdown-behavior -K /path/to/x509-key.pem -C /path/to/x509-cert.pem
If the value is not stop
, then do
ec2-modify-instance-attribute i-AMAZON-INSTANCE-ID -K /path/to/x509-key.pem -C /path/to/x509-cert.pem --instance-initiated-shutdown-behavior stop