I travel quite a lot for work. Most of it is in the US and Europe, but I get around to other places as well. Most of the time, connectivity, while not the greatest, isn’t that bad, or hard. I run a VPN on my phone and laptop. I can set up my RDS connectivity by getting whatever IP address I’ve been assigned, and I’m good to go.
However, recently, for whatever reason, I could not make a connection to AWS RDS no matter what I tried. I even switched over to my phone. I dropped my existing database (which hurt, just a test database, but now I have to rebuild it). Nothing. I validated every single possible problem. I went through all the troubleshooting steps. Nothing.
It’s Nice to Have Friends
I spent hours on this. I finally went to X and moaned a little. Greg Low, of SQL Down Under, gave me two letters:
VM
So, yeah, I went and spun up a virtual machine in EC2 on AWS. Not even in the same availability zone as my RDS database. I just wanted access. Now, I had some other issues (Java is not my friend), but eventually, I was all hooked up. I had full RDS connectivity, not only to RDS, but to Azure as well (running PostgreSQL databases there too).
Look. I had the right connection string. I reset the password so I know it was correct as well. I validated every possible way that I had the correct IP address in the firewall to allow access. There was something lower level, beyond my more limited networking skills, going on.
Conclusion
Yeah, short one. I still don’t know entirely what the issue was with both the hotel wifi and my phone, but neither was able to make the connection. I disabled VPNs on both devices (making myself extremely uncomfortable I don’t mind saying) while trying to troubleshoot this. However, the simple conclusion seemed to be that from where I was sitting (Utrecht in the Netherlands), I was not getting in to AWS RDS (got in to Azure over the phone).
Setting up a VM allowed me to at least get started working (albeit late, hoo boy, did I waste a lot of time). So, I guess this is a reminder to stop pounding your head on a wall sometimes and maybe see if other solutions can get you by? Or, it’s just a reminder that I’m an idiot? I’d put money on that second one.
Thanks Greg.
Look at the Carrier – one of the local Telcos where I live block a lot of ports and IP ranges and they are the source of pain. Just putting one more thing for you to check.
I’d guess a port blocked by the ISP. They do that a lot, and there are no easy error messages to show you what’s going on – stuff just doesn’t work.