Can't Ping my Amazon EC2 Server

A few months ago, when I was installing arch linux, I needed to check my internet connection. Pinging was an easy way to go. I ping-ed google. Good. Then i tried to ping my own server. Nothing.

I left it since it wasn’t important, but it sort of bothered me.

Fast forward to Sunday. I am studying SOLR for searches on my site. The tutorial suggests using ping to my server to check if solr is working or not. Then I remember that I can’t!!

A Few Hours Later

After mucking about with Ubuntu iptables and ubuntu’s firewall ufw, I finally stumble on a reference in a site the pretty much sent me in the right directions, but not quite 100%.

The Solution

The solution was to go to the AWS Management Console.

1. Go to the EC2Dashboard, and bring up your security groups.
2. Choose the correct group for your server.
3. Click the INbound tab.
4. Click the Edit button.
5. Click ‘add rule’, and choose ‘Custom ICMP Rule’.
6. Set the protocol to ‘echo reply’, and appropriate ip source.
7. repeat 6 and 5 but this time protocol is ‘echo request’
8. done!

Now you should be able to ping your server nicely.