FreeBSD on EC2

The following FreeBSD AMIs are available (additional obsolete AMIs are listed at the bottom of this page). For most users and applications, the FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE for 64-bit Windows AMI will be the most appropriate one to use.

To use FreeBSD/EC2:

1. Look in the table below and find the correct AMI number for the version of FreeBSD you want (most likely the highlighted row) and the EC2 region you want to launch the EC2 instance into.
2. Launch the EC2 instance.
3. Adjust your security group if necessary to allow incoming TCP connections on port 22 (SSH) from your IP address.
4. (Optional) Look at the EC2 instance console output ("Get System Log" on the EC2 console) for the SSH host keys. Note that you may need to wait about five minutes for these to appear. (You can also use my ec2-knownhost script to parse the EC2 console log and add keys to your ssh known_hosts file automatically.)
5. For releases prior to 9.1-RC2 or 8.4-BETA1, SSH in as "root". For 9.1-RC2 or 8.4-BETA1 and later releases, SSH in as "ec2-user".
6. You can now use the EC2 instance like any other FreeBSD system, with the exception that you can't use FreeBSD Update to fetch kernel security updates (you'll need to manually rebuild and reinstall the XENHVM kernel).

FreeBSD version	us-east-1 (N Virginia)	us-west-1 (N California)	eu-west-1 (Ireland)	ap-southeast-1 (Singapore)	ap-northeast-1 (Tokyo)	us-west-2 (Oregon)	sa-east-1 (Sao Paulo)	ap-southeast-2 (Sydney)
FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE For 64-bit "Windows" instances	ami-5339bb3a	ami-4c8baa09	ami-c0b2bfb4	ami-35054767	ami-cef348cf	ami-aa09819a	ami-05fc2418	ami-d54addef
FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE For 32-bit "Windows" instances	ami-9d38baf4	ami-9c88a9d9	ami-68b2bf1c	ami-0905475b	ami-b6f348b7	ami-b2098182	ami-0dfc2410	ami-d34adde9
FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE For Cluster Compute, High-I/O, and "m3" instances	ami-d738babe		ami-7cb2bf08
FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE For 64-bit "Windows" instances	ami-29611440	ami-31eac474	ami-bb9080cf	ami-978cc2c5	ami-f743cbf6	ami-5769f867	ami-30de7b2d	ami-bfe07385
FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE For 32-bit "Windows" instances	ami-5f611436	ami-21eac464	ami-d79080a3	ami-eb8cc2b9	ami-eb43cbea	ami-5369f863	ami-3ade7b27	ami-43e07379
FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE For Cluster Compute, High-I/O, and "m3" instances	ami-4761142e	ami-15eac450	ami-11908065	ami-e38cc2b1	ami-cf43cbce	ami-6369f853	ami-3ede7b23	ami-59e07363
FreeBSD 7.4b-RELEASE For 64-bit "Windows" instances	ami-8d985ee4	ami-59e8ba1c	ami-541c2c20	ami-1ad7af48	ami-96ca7f97	n/a	n/a	n/a
FreeBSD 7.4b-RELEASE For Cluster Compute / High-I/O instances	ami-0d08cc64	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a

EC2 quirks

• The network is configured and the sshd daemon is enabled, for obvious reasons.
• On AMIs up to and including FreeBSD 9.1-RC1 or 8.3-RELEASE: SSH logins as root are enabled, but root's password is starred out (i.e., password logins as root will fail until a password is set).
• From FreeBSD 9.1-RC2 and 8.4-BETA1 onwards, you will need to login as "ec2-user" and su to root.
• The first time an AMI is booted, a script fetches the public half of an SSH keypair from EC2 and arranges for root logins using that key.
• Every time the the AMI boots, it prints the SSH host keys to the console in the same format as Amazon Linux AMIs do.
• The /etc/motd file contains some comments about FreeBSD/EC2 and a link to this page.
• In the default configuration, kernel panics (including backtraces) are reported to the FreeBSD/EC2 maintainer to assist him in identifying and fixing bugs.
• Some EC2-specific patches have been applied to FreeBSD in order to improve performance and work around bugs. These are contained in /root/ec2-bits/*.patch.
• Because EC2 AMIs have non-GENERIC kernels, FreeBSD Update cannot update their kernels. Updating should be performed by using FreeBSD Update to update the /usr/src tree and then rebuilding the kernel from source.

Packaging new AMIs

1. Launch the FreeBSD AMI you want to base your AMI on.
2. Make your changes (installing packages, adjusting configurations, etc).
3. Delete the file /root/.ssh/authorized_keys or /home/ec2-user/.ssh/authorized_keys (otherwise your SSH key will be able to log in to any instances launched from this AMI).
4. Create the file /root/firstboot (otherwise the AMI you create won't know to download the new SSH public key for logins).
5. Stop the instance (but do not terminate it).
6. Use the ec2-create-image tool or the "Create Image" command in the EC2 Management Console to create an AMI from the instance.
7. Terminate the instance.

About the author

Colin is available for consulting on FreeBSD/EC2 if anyone wants to support further work on FreeBSD/EC2. When he's not working on FreeBSD, Colin spends most of his time running his online backup service.

Obsolete AMIs