AWS EC2 powerShell tips

Ever find yourself looking for ways to use powerShell? maybe that’s just me. Hahaha

Recently I was supporting some EC2 in the cloud testing some new AWS features and services and I found my self locked out and released this machine was not domain joined but I couldn’t login.

With the windows PowerShell cmdlets swirling around my head I recalled a similar situation with a dev hyper-v client. This made me remember the root cause was an expired local user password.

I am not sure if I have ever had the chance to share the:

Get-LocalUser
Set-LocaUser

These two commands are a good way to quickly check users and set passwords. Let’s see if you can make use of these by tapping into

get-Help

My issue was resolved by using amazons PowerShell in the browser and changing the local users password expiration policy. I am sure other sys admins and cloud admins can leverage this using various powerShell cloud instances to connect to their cloud servers and clients. Expiration policy comes in handy when you only want the user to access the infra temporarily for development purposes.

I hope this finds that local user experience easier to manage due to the considerable amount time the powerShell devs put in to do this for admins.

Let me know if you used this differently, like script disabling and creating local accounts or the default administrator account.