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I have multiple Amazon EC2 instances which need to communicate using private IPs. However, so far I've been unable to ping one instance's private IP from another instance.

I can ping external addresses, such as their Elastic IPs and other sites (yahoo, google, etc), so it seems there's nothing wrong with the instances' network configuration.

Also, they are all in the same zone, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Does anyone have any idea what I could be doing wrong? Could this related to the Security Group settings?

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It turns out the problem was the Security Group settings after all.

I had been IP-restricting traffic, so only my external IP could communicate with the instances. I assumed the Security Groups didn't apply to communication between instances, but they do.

The solution was to also allow traffic from 10.0.0.0/8, which covers all possible EC2 private IPs. It would be more secure, to only allow traffic from specific private IPs, but that's a hassle since they can change.

This solves my problem for now. Probably the best solution would be to utilize Amazon's API to automatically tweak the Security Group IP-restrictions when instances are stopped and started.

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Security Group settings do not affect internal IPs since they're enforced on the cluster gateway.

As the instances are on the same zone you can check that your instances firewall if activated is accepting ping requests (ICMP echo)

Otherwise try spawning a third instance and ping both of them, if that succeeds then it could be due to a problem on the host server of one of the instances

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I've tried spawning a third instance, but none of them seem to be able to ping any of the others using private IPs. I haven't setup the firewalls on any of the instances either, so I don't think that's the problem. I'll try setting them up (which I need to do anyway), but set them to allow all traffic. – ks78 Feb 6 '11 at 15:20
Nope, setting up the firewall and allowing all traffic through had no effect. – ks78 Feb 6 '11 at 21:16
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