It has been a crazy week at work and with life. I have been working on several projects at work. I currently have at least 4 projects that I am working on. Each one provides a unique learning experience. It’s always so fun (and stressful). For instance, this week I had to try and recover an admin password for an EC2 instance on Amazon. To make things worse we don’t have the public/private let pairs for the machine either.
I can’t go into too much detail, but a little background on this project might help. The client payed someone to develop a system. They parted ways and now something is broken. They are paying us to try and fix the system. I’ve had to play detective piece a bunch of stuff together. The thing that is broken resides on a machine that we need access to. This machine is hosting a website and has passwords I need, and I’m pretty sure this is where the problem is.
I am NOT a professional IT man, and I can hack my way through things. Acting with confidence when mucking around with machines on AWS isn’t my strong point. This is probably something I need to work on. Full Stack developer? Is IT included in that?
I did a lot of research and looking into how to change the password. I found a lot of options, but none with clearly marked prerequisites. They also use a bunch of terms, I have no idea what they are, so when they do list a prerequisite, I fail to catch it. Needless to say, I ended up finding them after I had gone down the rabbit hole.
One thing you may, or may not know about me is, I am a big worry wart. I worry about things going wrong that may not go wrong. If I don’t own the data, I get this super anxious feeling that everything is going to break or blow up. My heart rate always skyrockets. Hopefully I can post a graph from my Fitbit.
A few attempts at getting the password was made earlier in the week, but nothing that required powering down the server. Thursday at 1pm was going to be the best time to make another attempt. The client had a few demo’s that he was doing. After about two hours of stress (cloning, moving IPs, installing software, etc), I get to the point a where I can run the software that allows me to change the password. EC2Rescue was suppose to be the rescue, but it failed miserably. There was a read/write permission issue. Nothing in the docs said anything about this. I don’t think I missed it… the stress level was elevated after this discovery.
Now it was freaking out out mode. I mounted the two drives from the machine I needed to get to, and luckily I could see files and I searched and found some of the things I needed
Time was running out, so I set the IP addresses back to the old machine and brought it back up. The client had a demo in the morning, so we tested the site/apps to make sure everything was working. A new plan had to be revised, because I didn’t want to waste any more time.
I was able to find some passwords on the drives mounted earlier. The passwords were useful to make the necessary changes to another system. Friday night the build started working. Excitement was in the air! Emailing the client the news brought me great joy! I have one more task to complete this week, but it requires a Mac, iPhone Emulator, and an Xcode expert. I will talk to that guy on Monday. We should be able to get everything working.
It’s been a crazy project, and I hope we get to work with this client more in the future. Coding is my first love, and solving complicated non-coding issues is second. I’ve learned a ton from this project!
Please forgive my random thoughts/posts.
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