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spinlock
Asked: 2012-03-08 10:57:14 +0800 CST

portforward ec2 instance to localhost for rails development

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I'm trying to work with facebooks real-time updates but I'm having trouble giving facebook a callback address that they can use. My dev machine is behind a firewall so I want to use an ec2 instance to forward traffic to the dev machine.

Progress so far:

  • App is up and running on localhost:

    http://0.0.0.0:5000

  • Created Ubuntu 10.11 instance on ec2

  • Authorize ports on ec2 instance

    localhost$ec2-authorize default -p 5000 
localhost$ec2-authorize default -p 22

  • Configure sshd on ec2

    localhost$ssh -i ubuntu@ec2_public_dns -i ~/.ssh/ec2_key_pair.pem
ec2$sudo echo "AllowTcpForwarding yes" >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config
ec2$sudo echo "GatewayPorts yes" >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config
ec2$sudo /ect/init.d/ssh restart

  • Start ssh tunnel

    localhost$ssh -R0.0.0.0:5000:localhost:5000 ubuntu@ec2_public_dns -i ~/.ssh/ec2_key_pair.pem

  • Test it in the browser

    http://ec2_public_dns:5000

But nothing happens :( The request just times out. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks!

PROGRESS

OK, I'm making some progress hitting the web server on my local machine. After I ssh in, I can get the home page from the prompt using curl:

localhost$ssh -R0.0.0.0:5000:localhost:5000 ubuntu@ec2_public_dns -i ~/.ssh/ec2_key_pair.pem
ec2$curl localhost:5000
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
...
</html>

It even works with the ec2_public_dns from the ec2:

ec2$curl ec2-23-20-132-36.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5000

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
...
</html>

but, it can't connect from my local development machine:

localhost$curl ec2-23-20-132-36.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5000
curl: (7) couldn't connect to host
amazon-ec2 ssh ruby-on-rails tunneling

1 Answers

  1. @spinlock: you never returned to claim your answer, but access rules struck me as the first possibility anyway. I definitely recommend anybody using EC2 spend a bit of time with the Security Groups stuff at first, it's powerful and really helpful. For sake of anyone googling, spinlock's answer is:

    OK, I figured out where I went wrong. When I created the ec2 instance, I chose "quick launch" because I figured I just needed a simple unix that had sshd running on it. The problem is, this creates a separate security group named "quicklaunch-1".

    So do this:

    localhost$ ec2-authorize quicklaunch-1 -p 5000
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