How Can I Enable Root SSH Access in An Amazon EC2 Instance?
This issue has been bugging me for the past several days.
I've been working on setting up a LAMP Server on Amazon EC2. The main issue is that I'm writing an application for a client that requires a lot of high-end processing, and Amazon EC2 seemed like a good choice.
Initially I started off with a basic AMI which really didn't have anything. I tried using root access to log into SSH (using WinSCP) and I was told to use ec2-user.
I tried using ec2-user, and I was able to log in. However, I still didn't have root access and couldn't install apache. I did some reason and I found out about the "sudo" command, and pretty much every article I read on this issue said to either use root access, or log into ec2-user and user sudo.
I have since tried again with a different AMI where LAMP was already installed. I was able to get it working, set up a database and start running a website off of it. However, I still needed to install some extensions. Namely, an API I'm trying to use for this application requires SOAP to be installed.
Here's my dilemma:
/$ whereis soap
soap:
/$ whereis yum
yum: /usr/bin/yum /etc/yum /etc/yum.conf /usr/share/man/man8/yum.8.gz
/$ yum install php-soap
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, priorities, security
You need to be root to perform this command.
/$ sudo yum install php-soap
sudo: sorry, you must have a tty to run sudo
Command 'sudo yum install php-soap' failed with return code 1 and error message sudo: sorry, you must have a tty to run sudo
I can't use yum because I don't have root access, and whenever I log into root it either tells me to use ec2-user or provide a password I don't have. The other alternative was to use sudo to make ec2-user act like root, but I always get the error 'sorry, you must have a tty to run sudo.' I've ran that error message online and that it seems I need to add a user to sudoers... which I can't do without root access.
This exact same issue plagued me on two separate AMI's. On the first I just received a message saying I had to log in as ec2-user (and I must have a tty to run sudo), while the second (with LAMP installed) required me to enter a password for root, and for user I got the same sudo error.
Here are the id's of the AMI's I used:
ami-8c1fece5
ami-6ae81503
I also tried a third AMI later that also had LAMP installed... I couldn't even get into that one at all.
I did download my SSH key and used PuttyGen to convert it to a ppk file. I can log in successfully as ec2-user, but I cannot gain root access anywhere.
I have been looking around quite a bit for help on this, but every article I've read assumes that the user either has root access available or has sudo available on ec2-user. I don't have either. Is it just that I need a new image?
Any help would be greatly appreciated...
Answer
I just tried
$ sudo su
on one of your amis and voila! I am root...
Have fun!
[ec2-user@ip-10-244-146-238 ~]$ sudo su
[root@ip-10-244-146-238 ec2-user]#