How can I get around a length limit on EC2 system logs retrieved through the console?

Question

I am running ami-ccf405a5, which is a Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick EBS boot from alestic.com in a micro instance in us-east from the AWS Console. I use the user-data field to load in a script, the beginning of which is below, that updates and installs packages, creates a new user and sets up their environment.

#!/bin/bash
set -e -x
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
function die(){
    echo -e "$@" >> /dev/console
    exit 1}
aptitude -yq update && aptitude -yq safe-upgrade
aptitude -yq install irb libopenssl-ruby libreadline-ruby rdoc ri ruby rake ruby-dev rubygems

I am finding that "ec2-get-console-output INSTANCEID" and "Get System Log" on the AWS Console will only output 846 lines or 68k of logs, cutting off in the middle of the last aptitude statement.

Is there a way to get more of the syslog to track the progress of my user-data script?

Answer 1

I'm not sure if there is a way to get more data from the console log.

However, I understand that you want to look at the output of the user-data script you are sending. You can do that by SSHing into the machine and taking a look at /var/log/cloud-init.log. That should give you a complete log of all the actions your user-data script did.