We have an AWS estate of EC2’s and many other components. Whilst doing some testing, I was frustrated at the low-end specification of a server I wanted to build - I didn’t want to invest in more cash than necessary. “Can I run Amazon Linux 2023 on my own virtual machine?”
You can download Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) as a virtual disk and run it from your system. The only issue here is that unless you know the username and password to access it, you’re not getting very far.
Index of /os-images/2023.6.20241121.0
I downloaded a qcow2 image to run with libvirt. When I started it up, it takes me straight to a login prompt. But I have no credentials. The proper way to do this seems to be to use cloud-init to use a seed ISO file for the required user data.
Complete Guide: Running Amazon Linux 2023 on VMware — Configuration and Setup Instructions
- The link details how to do it with VMware, but it’s a similar process for
cloud-initthat can be applied on other platforms.
Instead, I went looking for a program called virt-rescue this led me to guestfish. Guest fish can mount a qcow2 file interactively. Then all I had to do was paste my SSH public key into /home/ec2-user/authorized_keys. Now when I start the virtual machine I can SSH in as the ec2-user, and it has full sudo capabilities to let me do anything.
sudo guestfish --rw -a al2023.qcow2 -i