Symetrik Domino Consulting

I’m writing this blog post in the hopes that some wise soul out there happens to read this post and responds with the answer. I am truly stumped.

I’m running an instance store instance at Amazon. I would like to bundle a custom AMI in case something happens to the instance as it did to our instance a few days ago.

Our instance is built from a high availability, high performance AMI built by Pantheon. After we spin up the instance, we still have a bit of customizations. Namely setting up the mail/mailboxes, setting the hostname, installing Webmin, etc. etc.

We wanted to bundle our customizations into a new AMI in case something happened to the instance again and we could simply spin up a new instance from the AMI, change the public DNS and MX record, and re-attach the EBS volume where our /var/www and MySQL data is located.

After searching various and sundry locations on the web on how to re-bundle an AMI from a running instance, I came up with the following commands.

I’m using this command where 123456789123 is not my actual Amazon user ID, and I’ve copied my Amazon private key and certificate to the /mnt/ids directory.

$ sudo ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt/amis -k /mnt/ids/pk-*.pem -c /mnt/ids/cert-*.pem -u 123456789123 -r i386

I get the following:

Copying / into the image file /mnt/amis/image...
Excluding:
/sys/kernel/debug
/sys/kernel/security
/sys
/var/log/mysql
/var/lib/mysql
/mnt/mysql
/proc
/dev/pts
/dev
/dev
/media
/mnt
/proc
/sys
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules
/mnt/amis/image
/mnt/img-mnt
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1048576 bytes (1.0 MB) copied, 0.00273375 s, 384 MB/s
mkfs.ext3: option requires an argument -- 'L'
Usage: mkfs.ext3 [-c|-l filename] [-b block-size] [-f fragment-size]
[-i bytes-per-inode] [-I inode-size] [-J journal-options]
[-G meta group size] [-N number-of-inodes]
[-m reserved-blocks-percentage] [-o creator-os]
[-g blocks-per-group] [-L volume-label] [-M last-mounted-directory]
[-O feature[,...]] [-r fs-revision] [-E extended-option[,...]]
[-T fs-type] [-U UUID] [-jnqvFKSV] device [blocks-count]
ERROR: execution failed: "mkfs.ext3 -F /mnt/amis/image -U 2c567c84-20a1-44b9-a353-dbdcc7ae863b -L "

Here are the results of df -h, so I know I’ve got plenty of room on /mnt:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             9.9G  2.1G  7.4G  22% /
devtmpfs              834M  124K  834M   1% /dev
none                  851M     0  851M   0% /dev/shm
none                  851M   96K  851M   1% /var/run
none                  851M     0  851M   0% /var/lock
none                  851M     0  851M   0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sda2             147G  352M  139G   1% /mnt
/dev/sdf             1014M  237M  778M  24% /vol

Does anybody have any clue what the mkfs.ext3 errors are all about? I’ve posted this over at the Amazon EC2 discussion forum and the Pantheon Drupal group with no response and I have scoured google and I can’t find anything like this.

3 Responses to “Problem creating an AMI from a running instance with ec2-bundle-vol”