Purpose

Describe how to access the files inside of a Hipchat Server's Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume.

Solution

Part A - Detaching the EBS volume
1. Stop the EC2 Instance
2. In the EC2 Web Console, click on the 'root' device (/dev/sda1) found in the Instance details
3. Make a note of the EBS ID (e.g. vol-12345678)
4. Take a snapshot of the instance
5. Click on the EBS Volume ID to view the Elastic Block Store listing of the volume
6. Right-click on the Volume and select "Detach Volume"


Part B - Attaching the EBS volume

1. Start/Launch a new EC2 Instance (e.g. the latest Hipchat Server AMI)
2. After the new instance is booted, make a note of the Instance ID
3. Right-click on the Volume that is detached and shows an "available" state
4. Fill in the Instance: ID (AWS Web Console will autocomplete for you and indicate the name and status)
5. The Device field will autocomplete (e.g. /dev/sdf), make a note of it
2. In the EC2 Web Console's Instance details there should now be an additional Block device, e.g. /dev/sdf


Part C - Mounting the device to the operating system

1. SSH into the new EC2 Instance and become root:

sudo dont-blame-hipchat

2. List the block devices available:

lsblk
    xvdf                              202:80   0    60G  0 disk
      xvdf1                           202:81   0    60G  0 part

3. Check the type of data on the volume:

file -s /dev/xvdf
    /dev/xvdf: x86 boot sector
 file -s /dev/xvdf1
     /dev/xvdf1: Linux rev 1.0 ext4 filesystem data, UUID=5866667e-914b-41fa-bc6c-836db0c9725f, volume name "cloudimg-rootfs" (needs journal recovery) (extents) (large files) (huge files)

4. Create a mount point, then mount the volume:

mkdir -p /mnt/myhipchatdata
mount /dev/xvdf1 /mnt/myhipchatdata -t ext4
ls -ahl /mnt/myhipchatdata

The newly mounted space contains all of the underlying folders and data from the EBS volume. In the example above, it can be access at /mnt/myhipchatdata.

Additional Resources

• The following article is helpful but "assumes that you're mounting an empty volume" which is what we are doing: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-using-volumes.html
• https://alestic.com/2011/02/ec2-fix-ebs-root/
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28792272/attaching-and-mounting-existing-ebs-volume-to-ec2-instance-filesystem-issue