EDIT – No, not even this works. I feel like I’m losing my mind.
EDIT 2 – Oh, apparently you *have* to specify the boot kernel. Have to. Can’t use “use default” as I have been for, like, ever. Ugh. Angry.
I just blew a horrible amount of time on this. I’ve burned many an AMI – based on ephemeral store and EBS-backed volumes. But trying to do it ‘right’ – with programmable private keys and whatnot – seemed to be out of my grasp, at least when using Amazon’s own Linux distro.
If you try to customize Amazon Linux you will find that some things that are normally done by cloud-init don’t seem to work on your image. Namely, setting ssh keys. It works fine when you first boot the pristine Amazon image, but when you try to burn your own it won’t seem to set the ssh keys properly.
To set them, make sure you blow out the contents of /var/lib/cloud/ – and both /root/.ssh/authorized_keys as well as /home/ec2-user/.ssh/authorized_keys. They’ll get reset on next boot.
This isn’t documented anywhere and I basically had to dick around with strace and flipping through all of the python code to figure out that there’s a semaphore file in /var/lib/cloud/sem that gets set and then the ssh-setting-script at boot will never run again. It makes me angry – but maybe that’s Amazon’s point; they don’t want you to customize their image so they can save on EBS volume space. I don’t know. Pisses me off and wastes my time for sure though.
You would think that at least when I try to run stuff by hand it would say “Oh, hey, there’s a semaphore file right here – make sure to yank it if you really want to run your scripts again.” Not this silent no-message bullshit.
ARGH.
-B.