The Quest Begins
I have a bit of an update on the Amazon fiasco I talked about in the “Work is Fun“.
We have been trying to get into that AWS Machine for sometime now. The client contacted Amazon, but they would only do so much unless you paid for a “Premium Plan“. He was on the Developer plan, but they wanted him to go to the Business or Enterprise. The Business price is pretty pricey and the Enterprise is even more! If you have some time, I would check it out. Looking at the Business plan, you can see how crazy your bill could get.
First Attempt
On Monday the Amazon support gave us a link to try, but I was too busy to try. The next day, Tuesday, I started attempting this fix.. Half way through the page, I came to the realization that this is exactly what I tried before and it wasn’t going to help much, but I was willing to give it a shot. I was sure they understood the problem and gave good advice.
I shut down the site and started copying the VM and doing as instructed. The whole process took about 2 hours to complete, due to a lot of paranoia and double checking. The client was contacted and he switch his account to the Business account and summoned someone from support to call me. Of course, when they called it said “SCAM LIKELY” so I was a little reluctant to answer.
Lets try and fix your problem
The person on the other end talked to me and was trying to understand our problem. He wanted me to try the process again, because the tech who send us that list must have known what he was talking about. The support guy even offered to READ it to me. Feeling a little annoyed, I said to him:
Me: “Sir, my goal here is to try and recover the admin password, right? Do you see anything in these instructions that will help me accomplish my goal?”
Support: “Oh.. You are right. Let me check something”
He later came back with nothing that could help. He did see that we were now on the Business plan, which allowed the case to be escalated to the people who have the technical skills to help. Come to find out, He explained that he was in accounting and he couldn’t help anymore than he already had. I had to wait for someone to call me.. .. Oh great.
Trying to sync up.
Tuesday night, We were getting the boy ready for bed and I looked down at my phone and noticed I was getting another call but it was from an “Unknown Number”, so I let it go to voicemail. The voicemail had some guy from amazon saying he was calling about our case. What the heck!? Why would they be calling me from an Unknown Number? That is ridiculous. I turned off all spam blocking on my phone and allowed all unknown numbers to come through. (read: ANNOYING)
The next day, Wednesday, I sat around waiting for another call. About 3 in the afternoon, I emailed the client asking if I should just be waiting for a call, or what was going to happen? He got on the site and summoned Amazon again and they called right away, from an “Scam Likely” number. Of course, I answered the phone. It was the same people in accounting. They looked over the case and said they would put in a note to have the tech call me during MY work hours (9am – 5pm), not theirs so we could hook up. They were informed that the number had to come from a legit number, or it wouldn’t get answered.
The call.
Thursday morning around 10:10am, I was sitting in a weekly call with a client going over some recent changes and I get a call and the caller Id read “2”. Just the number 2? That was pretty odd, but I had to answer the phone. The phone call was from Amazon and he wanted to work through the problem right then. The decision was made to do it right then and skip the other meeting, so we proceeded.
The guy wanted to send me a link so he could see my screen. I’ve heard this before, where they want to steal all your stuff after they take control, but this was Amazon calling and they wouldn’t do that right!? No, they wouldn’t, but the thought went through my mind.
I was sent a link through the AWS Console, attached to the case, and it was pretty safe and actually really cool! He could see my screen, but had no control. He had a pointer that would show up where he wanted me to click. It was quite cool. He guided me through each step to try.
Come to find out, I had found a video earlier that didn’t work, I had a few things set up from that video that helped us accomplish our goal. All we had to do was turn on some Management stuff and pull up a Powershell window and we were on the machine.
Changing the password
The first thing we tried was resetting the Administrator password, but that failed. It looks like the previous company had deleted the Administrator account, which I think is valid. It makes it harder for someone to break in.
The second thing we did was add a new user with Admin privileges. This was super easy and slick. After creating the account I was able to RDP into the machine without any problems!
The work begins
I was able to get in and the client was super excited when I reported back to him. The process of learning the system and making some important fixes begins now. It doesn’t help that I’m super swamped at work, but i’m going to do my best to try and make this client happy. It is a fun project that I’m excited to work on.
I’m super impressed with the amazon support. It may be expensive for support, but it seemed worth it. Especially since I wasn’t paying for it!