I was trying to associate an elastic IP to a running EC2 VM today and kept hitting this error. There is surprisingly little available via Google when typing in the error message – nothing actually with an exact match. So I figured I’d drop a quick post to help out other people like myself who might run into this issue.
I added an elastic IP and saw it in the list. The next day I noticed I got billed ($.03) for having an elastic IP that wasn’t assigned to an instance. OK. Strange but whatever. I went into the management console to assign the elastic IP to my running instance. I right-clicked and chose “associate” but no matter what options I tried to link it to my VM, it kept giving me this error.
Well, after some playing around – for way longer than I wanted to spend – I deleted the elastic IP and recreated it. When first creating (“allocating”) an elastic IP it gives you two choices – EC2 or VPC. The default selected in the list is EC2 and that’s what I originally left as my selected choice. I changed this to VPC and voila! – now I could associate the IP to my running VM nice and easily.
So, what’s the deal? Well, I guess new EC2 instances are created as VPC instances now by default. I don’t remember being asked or prompted when I created my instance.
VPC at Amazon stands for “Virtual Private Cloud”. If you are curious, here is a post that lists the differences between a classic EC2 instance and a newer VPC instance.
Hopefully this little tip saves someone else some time. I sure wish I’d stumbled across it earlier and saved the hassle and headache of tinkering to figure it out on my own.
Happy hosting!
Thanks Brad. This was causing me to go grey and/or bald. Cheers
My pleasure Ronny. I’m glad it helped someone else.