Uly.me

cloud engineer

GCP SSH Issues Return Code [1]

If you are getting this return code [1] error, check if enable-oslogin metadata is set to TRUE in your VM.

Here’s the error when logging in.

gcloud compute ssh your-server-name \
--zone us-central1-a \
--project your-project-id \
--internal-ip &
ERROR: (gcloud.compute.ssh) [C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Cloud SDK\google-cloud-sdk\bin\sdk\plink.exe] exited with return code [1].

Remove metadata.

gcloud compute instances remove-metadata your-server-name \
--keys=enable-oslogin \
--zone us-central1-a \
--project your-project-id
Updated [https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/your-project-id/zones/us-central1-a/instances/your-server-name].

Run gcloud ssh again.

gcloud compute ssh your-server-name \
--zone us-central1-a \
--project your-project-id \
--internal-ip &
[1] 1257

This time it opens up a Putty session and you’re able to login.

GCP Update Instance Metadata

How to update an instance metadata in GCP.

gcloud compute instances add-metadata instance-name \
--metadata key-name=value \
--project your-project-id \
--zone us-central1-a

In this example, we are adding enable-oslogin=TRUE.

gcloud compute instances add-metadata instance-name \
--metadata enable-oslogin=TRUE \
--project your-project-id \
--zone us-central1-a

GCP Web Server

Here’s a quick script to stand up a web server based on Centos image.

gcloud compute instances create [VM-NAME] \
    --zone=[ZONE] \
    --image-family=debian-9 \
    --image-project=debian-cloud \
    --tags=allow-ssh,allow-health-check \
    --subnet=lb-subnet \
    --metadata=startup-script='#! /bin/bash
apt-get update
apt-get install apache2 -y
a2ensite default-ssl
a2enmod ssl
vm_hostname="$(curl -H "Metadata-Flavor:Google" \
http://169.254.169.254/computeMetadata/v1/instance/name)"
echo "Page served from: $vm_hostname" | \
tee /var/www/html/index.html
systemctl restart apache2'

Display Instance ID & IP Address

How to display IP address and Instance ID on web page behind a AWS load balancer.

Add these 2 commands in crontab. The job runs every 5 mins.

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id > /var/www/html/id.txt
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-ipv4 > /var/www/html/ip.txt

You can view on the site.

# your domain
http://yourdomain.com/ip.txt
http://yourdomain.com/id.txt
# your server ip address
http://1.1.1.1/ip.txt
http://1.1.1.1/id.txt