How to base64 encode and upload userdata for EC2 Launch Template

[Rafal Lukawiecki]

I have been using “tar cvyf fff ddd”, which I think is a compressed tarball using bzip. Should I use something else?

I have also noticed odd behaviour in the Console for LCs, but different behaviour in the Console for LCs, and yet different for CLI…

Thank you, Colin.
Rafal

> On 11 Mar 2019, at 19:21, Colin Percival <cperciva at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> On 3/11/19 2:42 AM, Rafal Lukawiecki wrote:
>> I hope someone can explain, as I have been lost in this for over a week. I would like to pass a small (4-5kB) tarball of files for the built-in cloud init script of the official FreeBSD 12.0 EC2 AMI to get untarred and processed (>, >>, or #!) upon instance launch. I have successfully done it for over 2 years using Launch Configurations but I cannot make it work using the new Launch Templates.
> 
> Is this a tarball, or a compressed tarball?
> 
> There's a longstanding bug (which I'm told is going to get fixed eventually!)
> in the AWS Console whereby any non-7-bit-clean user-data files get mangled
> and come out with each byte UTF-8 encoded.  I was only aware of this as an
> issue with the Console but it's entirely possible that someone at Amazon wrote
> the same bug in multiple places.
> 
> -- 
> Colin Percival
> Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
> Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid