My Lazy Ego

At one point I had this lofty dream of maintaining two blogs: lazyego to keep track of my inane stories and muehleman.com to keep track of the nerdy crap I do on a regular basis. However, as its become painfully evident that the sudden influx of a million social networks into my daily life has neutered my ability to keep up with one blog let alone two, I’ve decided to start posting nerdy stuff here. That’s right Mom, Dad, and some random observer in France. You will now be subjected to my troubleshooting skills on this awesome blog. Muehleman.com is now a fairly basic website with cool amazing facts about me. One day I’ll turn it into a full blown CV.

Without further ado, a problem that’s been vexing me for a few days:

Here at We&Co we’ve decided to cloudify our entire operation. Its 2011 and it just makes sense. Also I’m cheap and lazy so the cloud plays nicely into that. But whatever. I’m going through the motions of setting up our webservers on EC2 and its been fun but a massive pain in my ass. First and foremost, its been a loooong time since I set anything up on a linux machine. Second, these instances come online with out much of anything pre-installed. So I’m having to hack my way through getting even the most basic things configured. I’ve made great progress as most of the documentation is pretty straightforward. However, what should have been my easiest task, getting my EC2 instance to talk to my RDS (database) instance proved to be the most vexing.

By default, all Amazon instances are locked down military style. So you have to open a port to allow MySQL access from outside of Amazon. No big whoop. Piece of cake. However, what I ran into this weekend was getting a webserver instance on EC2 to talk to RDS. I figured this would be easy, no? FALSE. I struggled through configuration files, a million message board threads, until finally the solution was found here. I have no idea why, but you have to add a special security exception for access via an EC2 instance. Here’s what you do:

1) Go into RDS

2) Go into DB Security Groups

3) Scroll to the bottom and select “EC2 Security Group” (normally I’d select CIDR/IP)

4) Put the security group that your EC2 instance is in (could be default or some custom security group) and put in your Amazon AWS Account ID

5) Add the exception

And voila, you should now be able to connect your instance to your RDS instance.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 19th, 2011 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.