Ping an EC2 instance from your Local Machine
Borislav Hadzhiev
Last updated: Sep 26, 2021
Photo from Unsplash
How to Ping an EC2 instance from your Local Machine #
In order to ping an AWS EC2 instance from your local machine:
- Open the AWS EC2 console and click on the checkbox next to your EC2 instance
- Click on
Securityand open the security group in a new browser tab
- In the
Inbound rulestab of your security group, click onEdit inbound rules
- Click on the
Add rulebutton and add the following inbound rule:
- Type:
Custom ICMP - IPv4 - Protocol:
Echo Request - Port:
N/A - Source:
Anywhere-IPV4
The security group rule allows ping requests to the EC2 instance from any IP address in the world.
- Click save rules
If you want to scope down the IP addresses that are allowed to ping your EC2 instance, for
Source select My IP. This will only enable you to ping the instance from your current IP address.- Back in the EC2 console, verify the checkbox next to your EC2 instance is checked
- In the
Detailstab, copy thePublic IPv4 DNSaddress of your instance
- Use the
pingcommand to ping your EC2 instance from your local machine
shell
ping YOUR_EC2_PUBLIC_DNS
By default a security group denies all inbound access, so anytime you want to enable access to your EC2 instance, you have to edit its security group.
In our case to allow inbound ping requests to the instance, we had to add a new inbound security group to allow ICMP traffic.
