Whilst we are huge fans of the Amazon RDS database service (particularly the Multi-AZ setup), one thing that can be a problem is accessing your databases from the desktop. The standard trick of running an SSH tunnel to your EC2 instance doesn’t work here.
After much searching I found the following on an AWS discussion forum and it works perfectly:
ssh-add YourKey.pem
ssh -l <username> -L 33060:<ec2_rfc_ip>:3306 -N <ext_hostname>
Then connect your local MySQL client to localhost, port 33060
<username> is the login user on the EC2 instance from where you normally access the RDS MySQL DB. <ec2_rfc_ip> is the RDS instance’s IP address and <ext_hostname> is the external hostname of one of your EC2 instances.
A couple of notes:
- You have to use the internal AWS IP address of the RDS instance, not its name or its external IP
- We’ve only tested it on an Ubuntu desktop running inside VirtualBox on Windows
- It works fine with the MySQL GUI tools
- We haven’t been able to figure out how to do it directly with Putty on Windows. Anyone know how?
Thanks a Ton!! Sir … You saved my day!!!
I used Tunnelier for SSH/C2S Forwarding and worked great!