Locked myself out of SSH with UFW in EC2 AWS

Question

I have an EC2 Instance with Ubuntu. I used sudo ufw enable and after only allow the mongodb port

sudo ufw allow 27017

When th

Answer 1

# Update

Easiest way is to update the instance's user data

• Stop your instance
• In the console, select your instance, go to Actions -> Instance Settings -> View/Change user Data and

Paste this

Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="//"
MIME-Version: 1.0
--//
Content-Type: text/cloud-config; charset="us-ascii"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="cloud-config.txt"
#cloud-config
cloud_final_modules:
- [scripts-user, always]
--//
Content-Type: text/x-shellscript; charset="us-ascii"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="userdata.txt"
#!/bin/bash
ufw disable
iptables -L
iptables -F
--//

• Once added, restart the instance and ssh should work. The userdata disables ufw if enabled and also flushes any iptable rules blocking ssh access

Source here

# Old Answer

• Launch a new instance (recovery instance).

• Stop the original instance (DO NOT TERMINATE)

• Detach the volume (problem volume) from the original instance

• Attached it to the recovery instance as /dev/sdf.

• Login to the recovery instance via ssh/putty

• Run sudo lsblk to display attached volumes and confirm the name of the problem volume. It usually begins with /dev/xvdf. Mine is /dev/xvdf1

• Mount problem volume.

    $ sudo mount /dev/xvdf1 /mnt
    $ cd /mnt/etc/ufw
  

• Open ufw configuration file

    $ sudo vim ufw.conf
  

• Press i to edit the file.

• Change ENABLED=yes to ENABLED=no

• Type Ctrl-C and type :wq to save the file.

• Display content of ufw conf file using the command below and ensure that ENABLED=yes has been changed to ENABLED=no

    $ sudo cat ufw.conf 
  

• Unmount volume

    $ cd ~
    $ sudo umount /mnt
  

• Detach problem volume from recovery instance and re-attach it to the original instance as /dev/sda1.

• Start the original instance and you should be able to log back in.

Source: here