Remote root login is disabled on all Amazon Linux AMIs to prevent exploits. By default, you can only login as "ec2-user" to access instances launched from those AMIs. The ec2-user is in the sudo group so it can perform tasks that require root privilege. One example is ec2-bundle-vol that bundles up local file system for creating custom AMI. But unlike ec2-user, sudo is not configured with the default AWS environment variables like EC2_HOME and etc. An easy workaround is to use the "-E" option to let sudo inherit environment variables from ec2-user. From the sudo man page:
The -E (preserve environment) option will override the env_reset option in sudoers(5)). It is only available when either the matching command has the SETENV tag or the setenv option is set in sudoers(5).
Now, we can execute the ec2-bundle-vol command like this:
sudo -E /opt/aws/bin/ec2-bundle-vol -k /media/ephemeral0/private-key.pem -c /media/ephemeral0/cert.pem -u XXXXXXXXXXXX
I am surprised that this is not documented in the official doc.
