/etc/fstab not found when launching from AWS EC2

Zachaccino · October 22, 2019, 11:02am

Hi everyone! I’m new to Nix OS so this might be a dumb question but I can’t find anyone talking about this either…

Brief:
I built a nixos amazonImage using nix-build, uploaded to aws S3 storage and tried to launch it. EC2 told me “ClientError: Unable to find an etc directory with fstab”

Details:
I built an image using this command inside nixpkgs directory:
nix-build -A amazonImage.x86_64-linux nixos/release.nix

The resultant files were stored in the result directory:
nixos-amazon-image-20.03pre130979.gfedcba-x86_64-linux.vhd

I uploaded the file to S3 storage and I’ve setup the service role vmimport so I can launch it using aws import-image command.

After launching it, an error occured saying “ClientError: Unable to find an etc directory with fstab”

Relevant Files
The release.nix I used is identical to this:

github.com

NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/f03558890739d833b5705e8ca3044d32fcc58d18/nixos/release.nix

with import ../lib;

{ nixpkgs ? { outPath = cleanSource ./..; revCount = 130979; shortRev = "gfedcba"; }
, stableBranch ? false
, supportedSystems ? [ "x86_64-linux" "aarch64-linux" ]
, configuration ? {}
}:

with import ../pkgs/top-level/release-lib.nix { inherit supportedSystems; };

let

  version = fileContents ../.version;
  versionSuffix =
    (if stableBranch then "." else "pre") + "${toString nixpkgs.revCount}.${nixpkgs.shortRev}";

  # Run the tests for each platform.  You can run a test by doing
  # e.g. ‘nix-build -A tests.login.x86_64-linux’, or equivalently,
  # ‘nix-build tests/login.nix -A result’.
  allTestsForSystem = system:

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The amazon-image.nix I used is identical to this:

github.com

NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/f03558890739d833b5705e8ca3044d32fcc58d18/nixos/maintainers/scripts/ec2/amazon-image.nix

{ config, lib, pkgs, ... }:

with lib;

let
  cfg = config.amazonImage;
in {

  imports = [ ../../../modules/virtualisation/amazon-image.nix ];

  # Required to provide good EBS experience,
  # https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/nvme-ebs-volumes.html#timeout-nvme-ebs-volumes
  # TODO change value to 4294967295 when kernel is updated to 4.15 or later
  config.boot.kernelParams = [ "nvme_core.io_timeout=255" ];

  options.amazonImage = {
    name = mkOption {
      type = types.str;
      description = "The name of the generated derivation";
      default = "nixos-amazon-image-${config.system.nixos.label}-${pkgs.stdenv.hostPlatform.system}";

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Relevant Discussion but no solution
Some other devs(?) also had this issue back in may 2019 and they didnt seem to solve it either.

** Other Questions **
Do you nix-build amazonImage.x86_64-linux or ova.x86_64-linux or anyother image format for aws ec2?

Thanks guys.