How to access/ping a server located on AWS?

Question

With what address should a server located on AWS be accessed?

I've created an AWS instance and installed a web server on it. However the server is not reachable via any of the:

1. ec2-174-129-24-92.compute-1.amazonaws.com
2. the IP address from instance's ifconfig
3. an elastic IP address I've created on the AWS dashboard and associated with the instance

Surprisingly, ssh with [e-mail] works fine.

What might be the problem and how to bind an address to the instance?

Answer 1

Updated for 2014 - the current Amazon UI no longer uses numbers for ICMP types, so the existing answer doesn't work anymore.

In your security group:

• Click the inbound tab
• Create a custom ICMP rule
• Select echo request
• Use range 0.0.0.0/0 for everyone or lock it down to specific IPs
• Apply the changes

and you'll be able to ping.

Answer 2

Give 2 rules in AWS security group (Inbound),

Custom ICMP Rule       Echo Request          N/A            0.0.0.0/0

Custom ICMP Rule       Echo Reply            N/A             0.0.0.0/0

Answer 3

Ping doesn't work with EC2 because ping runs over the ICMP protocol which is blocked in a typical EC2 security group configuration.

Here's a very nifty way to work around this by using tcping (a ping alternative that works over a TCP port):

tcping ec2-174-129-24-92.compute-1.amazonaws.com

tcping ec2-174-129-24-92.compute-1.amazonaws.com 22

It runs on port 80 (the first example) but you can also specify a different port (the second example) to be used to test connectivity.

Answer 4

I found that if you install a VPN server on your AWS server, you can connect to the VPN and ping the private IP address in the virtual private network.