Cannot instantiate an AMI based on an old CentOS 6.4 (i386) - Release Media (original) (raw)

January 9, 2025, 6:33pm 1

Trying to access an old AWS AMI image based on “CentOS 6.4 (i386) - Release Media”.
However, none of the currently available EC2 instance types seem to be compatible with the image.
AWS support engineers has forwarded us to the CentOS community to seek help regarding the matter — what instance types (or other requirements) may be compatible with that old AMI

Since it is considered to be a “restricted product”, AWS support cannot help us, not at least without further help or advice from CentOS

Thank you!!
Pasha

smooge (Stephen J Smoogen) January 9, 2025, 7:33pm 2

CentOS 6.4 came out in 2013 and was based on kernels from 2011. Most of the hardware in AWS gets cycled out every couple of years so I don’t think anything would be able to run it. CentOS 6 was EOL in 2020 and is no longer getting updates. The Amazon equivalent was AWS 1 and it was EOL and the hardware supporting in 2023.

The best I can offer in advice would be to mount the AMI image from a system which does work in AWS and copy the data out. The services and tooling will need to be ported to a newer operating system .

smooge (Stephen J Smoogen) January 9, 2025, 7:49pm 3

Another option after copying the data would be to run a CentOS 6 VM inside another AMI system. I expect it would be ‘painful’ slow but if the service needed for some reason it could allow for extraction until a conversion to a newer operating system is possible.

pashabolokhov (Pasha Bolokhov) January 9, 2025, 8:45pm 4

We are just trying to access the data on the volume actually, we don’t really need to start an instance out of the AMI

We have restored a volume out of the storage of that AMI, and trying to attach and mount it to anything

However, the volume just won’t attach to any existing or a freshly created instance, citing some “Marketplace” incompatibility… And thereby, it’s not quite possible to for us to figure out what type of instance to create so that it should be able to attach that old recovered volume…

Any ideas?
Thanks!!

smooge (Stephen J Smoogen)

January 9, 2025, 9:32pm 5

Is the error something like:

The instance configuration for this AWS Marketplace product is not supported. 
Please see the AWS Marketplace site for more information about supported
instance types, regions, and operating systems.

Going from the ‘answer’ the ‘parent’ AMI needs to have newer types added to it which may or may not allow this image to then be mountable… I don’t know if that is possible for those old images or not. The Export an AMI-based VM using VM Import/Export | AWS re:Post might be another solution

pashabolokhov (Pasha Bolokhov) January 16, 2025, 4:12pm 6

Yes, this is the error that we are getting.

Who would we contact regarding adding newer instance types to the “parent AMI”, do you know by chance? Thanks!!

smooge (Stephen J Smoogen) January 16, 2025, 4:58pm 7

At this point I have no idea. I don’t know how uploads were done to CentOS back then and all of the people I know who might have done so are no longer with the project (it was not part of Red Hat back then so had different members). At this point, I would see if there is anyway to convert this AMI to a different storage medium in Amazon and interact with that… or if there is anyway to download that AMI locally to see if you can get around the problems with external conversion tools.

I wish I had a better solution but I have no others.

pashabolokhov (Pasha Bolokhov) January 16, 2025, 5:06pm 8

Thanks, appreciate your time!