Debian Wheezy (7.x) on AWS EC2

You may wish to use the CloudFormation template and launch your instance with some smart UserData scripts. For some releases you are free to choose the AWS Marketplace AMI, or the AMI that exists in the Debian AMI Account (account number 379101102735). All AMIs shared from the Debian AWS Account and their corresponding EBS snapshots are marked as public so can be inspected by any other AWS user.

SSH username

In line with the security of most Linux distributions on Amazon Web Services, remote root SSH is disabled (as is password authentication). You will need to connect to instances from this AMI as the user admin using your SSH key, and then sudo -i to gain root access.

Please note that a Marketplace image volume cannot be attached to another running instance (For example, to repair a broken /etc/fstab, or /etc/network/interfaces). This is a limitation of all Marketplace images, as described here: Official AWS documentation


7.3

The full list of AMIs worldwide in the Debian AMI account are (draft and experimental as at 19 December 2013):

Virtualisation

Para-virtualisation (PVM)

Root filesystem

EBS

Instance store

Bits

32 bit

64 bit

32 bit

64 bit

US-East-1

ami-33a68f5a

ami-0da18864

US-West-1

ami-8ebd8dcb

ami-96bd8dd3

US-West-2

ami-6a98fc5a

ami-7298fc42

EU-West-1

ami-66836b11

ami-8e826af9

AP-Southeast-1

ami-28efbb7a

ami-20efbb72

AP-Southeast-2

ami-7774eb4d

ami-7b74eb41

AP-Northeast-1

ami-53a0c252

ami-17a0c216

SA-East-1

ami-8f4fee92

ami-954fee88

US-Gov-West-1

The 7.3 release of Debian was built with the Python version of build-debian-cloud, and contains the CloudInit package installed from backports. Note that you can list these AMIs from the AWS CLI utility using a command of;

   1 aws --profile your-profile --region us-east-1 ec2 describe-images  --owners 379101102735  --filters Name=tag-key,Values=Name,Name=tag-value,Values=*7.3* --query "Images[*].{AMIID:ImageId,Description:Description}" --output text

7.1a

This update fixes an initialisation issue with Ecliptic Curve cryptography specific to the Wheezy 7.0 and 7.1 AMIs. It is recommended that you update your existing templates and launch configuration (for ?AutoScale) to the new AMIs. This does not affect older Squeeze (6.x) AMIs as ECC was not available in that release. To fix this issue on existing (currently launched and running) instances, please re-inistalise the relevant host key:

   1 rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key && ssh-keygen -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key -t ecdsa -C 'host' -N ''

The full list of AMIs worldwide in the Debian AMI account are:

Virtualisation

Para-virtualisation (PVM)

Root filesystem

EBS

Instance store

Bits

32 bit

64 bit

32 bit

64 bit

US-East-1

ami-f494e99d

ami-9e95e8f7

US-West-1

ami-b083aaf5

ami-9283aad7

US-West-2

ami-a5831095

ami-4d83107d

EU-West-1

ami-c35f43b7

ami-035f4377

AP-Southeast-1

ami-7a773e28

ami-46773e14

AP-Southeast-2

ami-7705964d

ami-7b059641

AP-Northeast-1

ami-dfde4ade

ami-b3de4ab2

SA-East-1

ami-5e288d43

ami-26288d3b

US-Gov-West-1

ami-0992f62a

ami-0f92f62c

These images were generated with the following script:

   1 #!/bin/sh
   2 apt-get update; apt-get install -y git curl; cd ~root; git clone https://github.com/andsens/build-debian-cloud.git; logger "Cloned"; cd ~root/build-debian-cloud; curl https://github.com/andsens/build-debian-cloud/pull/79.patch | git am; export EC2_ACCESS_KEY='XXXX'; export EC2_SECRET_KEY='XXXX'; ./build-debian-cloud ec2 --volume-size 8 --filesystem ext4 --plugin plugins/admin-user --description 'Debian 7.1 (Wheezy) Base' --plugin plugins/publish-ami --plugin plugins/publish-snapshot --codename wheezy; logger "Starting i386 build"; ./build-debian-cloud ec2 --volume-size 8 --filesystem ext4 --plugin plugins/admin-user --description 'Debian 7.1 (Wheezy) Base' --arch i386 --plugin plugins/publish-ami --plugin plugins/publish-snapshot --codename wheezy; shutdown -h now


Upgrading from previous 6.x.y releases

As is standard with Debian, a simple apt-get update && apt-get upgrade should bring all packages up to date. There is no need to reinstall, but any ?CloudFormation templates and ?AutoScale Launch Configurations should be tested with and then updated to use the current AMI. It is recommended not to use older point releases.

CloudFormation Template

CloudFormation is a templating system for defining AWS resources - see http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/

{
        "Parameters" : {
                "KeyName" : {
                        "Description" : "SSH Key Name",
                        "Type" : "String",
                        "Default" : "My-Key"
                },
                "MyInstanceSize": {
                        "Description": "Instance size (m1.small, etc.)",
                        "Type": "String",
                        "Default" : "t1.micro",
                        "AllowedValues": ["t1.micro", "m1.small", "m1.medium", "m1.large", "m1.xlarge", "m2.xlarge", "m2.2xlarge", "m2.4xlarge", "c1.xlarge", "cc1.4xlarge", "m3.xlarge", "m3.2xlarge"]
                },
                "MyInstanceName": {
                        "Description": "Instance name",
                        "Type": "String"
                },
                "InstanceBits": {
                        "Description": "32 or 64 bits",
                        "Type": "String",
                        "Default": "64",
                        "AllowedValues": [ "32", "64" ]
                },
                "RootVolType": {
                        "Description": "Root volume type (EBS or Instance)",
                        "Type": "String",
                        "Default": "EBS",
                        "AllowedValues": [ "EBS", "Instance" ]
                }
        },
        "Mappings" : {
            "Debian7.3-EBS-PVM" : { 
                "us-east-1" :      { "32" : "ami-33a68f5a", "64" : "ami-0da18864"},
                "us-west-1" :      { "32" : "ami-8ebd8dcb", "64" : "ami-96bd8dd3"},
                "us-west-2" :      { "32" : "ami-6a98fc5a", "64" : "ami-7298fc42"},
                "us-gov-west-1" :  { "32" : "ami-", "64" : "ami-"},
                "eu-west-1" :      { "32" : "ami-66836b11", "64" : "ami-8e826af9"},
                "ap-southeast-1" : { "32" : "ami-28efbb7a", "64" : "ami-20efbb72"},
                "ap-southeast-2" : { "32" : "ami-7774eb4d", "64" : "ami-7b74eb41"},
                "ap-northeast-1" : { "32" : "ami-53a0c252", "64" : "ami-17a0c216"},
                "sa-east-1" :      { "32" : "ami-8f4fee92", "64" : "ami-954fee88"}
            },
            "release" : {
                "stable" : { "wheezy" : "Debian7.3-EBS-PVM" }
            }
        },
        "Resources" : {
                "MyInstance" : {
                        "Type" : "AWS::EC2::Instance",
                        "Properties" : {
                                "SecurityGroups" : [ { "Ref" : "MySecurityGroup" } ],
                                "KeyName" : { "Ref": "KeyName" },
                                "Tags" : [{"Key": "Name", "Value": {"Ref" : "MyInstanceName"} } ],
                                "ImageId" : { "Fn::FindInMap" : [ "Debian7.3-EBS-PVM",  { "Ref" : "AWS::Region" }, { "Ref" : "InstanceBits" }  ]},
                                "InstanceType" : { "Ref" : "MyInstanceSize" },
                                "UserData" : { "Fn::Base64" : "" }
                        }
                },
                "MySecurityGroup" : {
                        "Type" : "AWS::EC2::SecurityGroup",
                        "Properties" : {
                                "GroupDescription" : "Permit inbound SSH",
                                "SecurityGroupIngress" : [ 
                                    {
                                        "IpProtocol" : "tcp",
                                        "FromPort" : "22",
                                        "ToPort" : "22",
                                        "CidrIp" : "0.0.0.0/0"
                                    }
                                ]
                        }
                }
        }
}

Suggested UserData scripts

As of the 7.3 release, the official Debian !AMIs now support cloud-init. This means you have much more flexability (and power) in what you cna put in your UserData to get your instance to configure. For example, a simple shell script that starts with #!/bin/sh will be executed as previously - so you can chose to enable auto update with the following UserData scripts:

   1 #!/bin/sh
   2 apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y && apt-get install -y unattended-upgrades python-pip

Some feature bugs may persist in Cloud-init in Debian 7.3 AMIs; no functionality has been lost, but it appears not all cloud-init directives can be used. Eg: packages, ssh-import-id, apt_update, apt-upgrade.


See also Cloud and Teams/Cloud.