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I have an Ubuntu 16.04 AWS instance that I accidentally locked myself out of by enabling UFW without allowing port 22 for SSH. I've created a new instance and mounted the volume of the affected instance to it.

Now I have access to the file system of the affected instance, how do I stop UFW from running on startup so that I can access the instance again through SSH? Alternatively, how do I allow access to port 22 for SSH through config files?

I've looked around online and my file structure doesn't seem to match what other people are using. In /media/myDrive/lib/ufw I don't have user.rules or user6.rules; these are in /etc/ufw/. I've edited the user*.rules files as below to allow access, but when I rebooted the server, I still couldn't access it via SSH.

#user.rules
-A ufw-user-input -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
-A ufw-user-input -p udp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
#user6.rules
-A ufw6-user-input -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
-A ufw6-user-input -p udp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT

Referenced from this SO question: Can't ssh into AWS EC2 after enabling firewall

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    Hi, Donglecow, I've added a comment, under the @jdgregson's answer. I just read your rules and I think you need to use -Insert to the beginning of the chain instead of -Append to the end. Also, probably (sorry currently I do not have UFW installed), the default INPUT chain will be read before the UFW's one, so you can try with some rules as: -I INPUT ... ...and the last one you don't need to allow UDP on the SSH port. – pa4080 Jul 26 '19 at 13:40
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You can try to disable UFW on startup through change of /etc/ufw/ufw.conf in this way:

ENABLED=no
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  • It's not working :/ I have this enabled=0 but still i'm unable to ssh... – Himanshu Bansal Jan 8 '20 at 13:50
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pa4080's answer seems like the correct answer, but I found that UFW was blocking pings and Samba connections after a default Ubuntu 14.04 install, even though ENABLED=no is the default setting in /etc/ufw/ufw.conf. After I stopped UFW with service ufw stop I was able to connect to the machine as expected.

Disabling UFW on startup

On Ubuntu 14.10 and earlier: sudo echo manual > /etc/init/ufw.override

On Ubuntu 15.04 and later: sudo systemctl disable ufw

On anything else or just to be sure: sudo echo "service ufw stop" >> /etc/init.d/rc.local

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  • Thanks for this. I've long worked around the problem now. @pa4080's answer didn't work for me which is why I didn't accept it. Though this looks like it would've been a more promising line to investigate. – Donglecow Apr 6 '18 at 8:02
  • Yes, you are right, jdgregson, recently I found that even you remove UFW, it leaves some rules in iptables that should be removed by hand. – pa4080 Jul 26 '19 at 13:32
  • @pa4080 So much for being an "Uncomplicated" Firewall... – jdgregson Jul 26 '19 at 22:39

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