The official Ubuntu AMIs published by Canonical for EC2 starting in October have proven to be solid and production worthy. However, you may still on occasion run into an issue which deserves to be brought to the attention of the Ubuntu server team developing these AMIs and the software which enables Ubuntu integration with EC2.
The easiest, most efficient, and most complete way to report problems with Ubuntu on EC2 is to use the ubuntu-bug tool which comes pre-installed on all Ubuntu systems.
The ubuntu-bug command requires a single argument which is one of:
the name of an Ubuntu software package experiencing a problem,
the path to a program related to the problem,
the process id of the program experiencing the problem, or
the path of a crash file.
When reporting EC2 startup issues with an Ubuntu instance, the involved package is generally ec2-init so the command to run would be:
ubuntu-bug ec2-init
This command should be run on the EC2 instance that is experiencing the problem. The ubuntu-bug command will collect relevant information about the instance and file it with the bug report to assist in tracking down and correcting the issue.
If the instance with the problem is no longer running or accessible, try to run another instance of the same AMI to report the bug. This will help submit the correct AMI information with the bug report.
If ubuntu-bug reports “This is not a genuine Ubuntu package” you might have to first run
sudo apt-get update
and then try again.
Unfortunately, ubuntu-bug is an interactive program which does not accept command line options to set choices, so you will need to respond to a couple prompts and then copy and paste a URL it provides to you. First, it asks:
What would you like to do? Your options are:
S: Send report (1.5 KiB)
V: View report
K: Keep report file for sending later or copying to somewhere else
C: Cancel
Please choose (S/V/K/C): S
Respond by hitting the “S” key because you really do want to report a problem.
ubuntu-bug then displays a URL and asks if you would like to launch a browser.
Choices:
1: Launch a browser now
C: Cancel
Please choose (1/C): C
Respond by hitting the “C” key as ubuntu-bug running on the EC2 instance can’t launch the web browser on your local system and you probably don’t want to use a terminal based browser.
Make a note of the URL displayed in:
*** To continue, you must visit the following URL:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ec2-init/+filebug/LONGSTRINGHERE?
Copy the URL and paste it into your web browser. You will continue reporting the problem through your browser and the system information will be attached after you submit.
If this is the first time you have used Launchpad.net, you will be prompted to create an account. Use a valid email address as you will need to confirm it.
Launchpad will prompt you to enter a “Summary” which should be a short description of the bug. If it is not a duplicate of one of the bugs already entered, click “No I need to report a new bug” and enter the “Further Information”. Include as much information as possible relevant to the issue. If a developer can reproduce the bug using this description, then it will be addressed more easily.
For general information on submitting bugs in Ubuntu, please see:
You can see also see a current list of open ec2-images bugs.
If you are reporting Ubuntu on EC2 bugs directly using Launchpad without ubuntu-bug (not recommended) make sure you include the AMI id and tag the bug with “ec2-images”.
Note that ubuntu-bug is not a mechanism to support general support questions. One place to get help with running Ubuntu on EC2 is from the community in the ec2ubuntu Google group and there’s always the general Amazon EC2 forum. You can occasionally get live help with Ubuntu on EC2 on the #ubuntu-server IRC channel on irc.freenode.net
$ alestic-bug this-article spelling-nit-pick
"file it with th bug report"
should be
"file it with the bug report"
Shlomo: Fixed, thanks!