Has anyone managed to get aws.greengrass.SystemsManagerAgent installing on Ubuntu 18.04?

Question

Hi,

When attempting to deploy the new aws.greengrass.SystemsManagerAgent (v1.0.0) Greengrass component, onto our IoT device (Nvidia Jetson Nano - running Ubuntu 18.04), it consistently fails to install, giving the error message 'Snap - Failed to install'.

To test what was going on, I found the installation steps used in the component recipe and attempted to replicate these manually. In doing so, I discovered that the command 'ssm-setup-cli -install' used in the 'Install' lifecycle step doesn't work on it's own, with the CLI tool erroring with the message 'Region must be specified'.

After changing the command to 'ssm-setup-cli -install -region eu-west-1' (i.e. adding the region in as an additional flag), the installation of the agent completed successfully.

Therefore, I believe a simple fix for this issue is to provide a means of specifying the region as part of the aws.greengrass.SystemsManager component configuration (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/greengrass/v2/developerguide/systems-manager-agent-component.html#systems-manager-agent-component-configuration), but I can't help feeling that is this was a problem for everyone, then it would have been reported and fixed by now?

Would appreciate any feedback on whether anyone's got this component installing correctly first time round?

Many thanks.

Answer

Hi there,

We'll investigate why it failed without the extra flag and loop back here later.

--------------------------------- 
Update: 
* `snap - failed to install`: it was reported before. They are investigating on this issue and will take this over. 
*  `Region must be specified`: Greengrass will set region env variable. When ran manually without Greengrass, the env variable missed which is expected.

Answer

Hi,

Region parameter can be passed through cli or as an environment variable. Systems Manager greengrass component sets the environment variable so ssm-setup-cli -install is all that is required in the lifecycle step.

The issue here seems to be snap failing to install the ssm agent. The setup cli ultimately runs

snap install /path/to/amazon-ssm-agent.snap --classic

which ends up failing on Nvidia Jetson Nano - running Ubuntu 18.04. We have tried reproducing with an Ubuntu 18.04 ec2 instance, but have not been successful.

If the above command succeeds when run manually but fails when setup cli runs it then possibly there is some configuration on the device which prevents the installation under certain conditions. Snap logs might help to root cause.

Has anyone managed to get aws.greengrass.SystemsManagerAgent installing on Ubuntu 18.04?

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