What To Do If You Lose Your EC2 Private Key

This hasn't happened to me, but knowing that it could encourages me to take note of how to address the scenario if it occurs. I came across a great example here (great step-by-step instructions). To sum up: Shutdown your instance Create an AMI Launch an instance from an AMI where you can create/choose a private …

Changing iDrac Settings via OMSA on an ESXi host

Let's say you need to reconfigure your ESXi host's iDrac.  Assuming you have OpenManage installed on the ESXi host, this is very simple... Log into OpenManage (be sure to check ignore certificates when logging in). The username and password will be the same as your ESXi root credentials. Expand System > Main System Chassis > …

Resetting the password on your Windows EC2 instance via SSM

I came across and interesting approach recently for resetting a misplaced/undocumented Windows administrator passwords in a reddit post.  This technique is only valid for instances with SSM installed. "SSM Agent is installed by default on Windows Server 2016 instances and instances created from Windows Server 2003-2012 R2 AMIs published in November 2016 or later." As …

Snapshotting Windows EC2 Instances with Powershell – Part 2

In Part 1, we successfully initiated a snapshot with Powershell.  Here we'll continue building out the script.   Cleaning Up Old Snapshots Anyone who's ever worked with regularly scheduled snapshots knows you need regularly scheduled cleanup or your AWS invoices will slowly creep up over time. I'll be filtering by Description to determine which snapshots do …

Snapshotting Windows EC2 Instances with Powershell – Part 1

As you likely already know, there's isn't an option to schedule EC2 instance snapshots within the AWS console. A popular way to address this would be to use Boto3, AWS' SDK for Python.  However, it is also possible to initiate EC2 snapshots with Powershell. Why would you want to do this with Powershell?   Let's say …