Error retrieving Glacier vault inventory via AWS CLI: Unknown options: inventory-retrieval}’

Amazon’s Glacier service is great, but low-cost storage has other costs. For example, you might have a vault but not know what archives it contains. You can retrieve the vault inventory–essentially listing the contents of a directory–but like any Glacier retrieval, it may take several hours.

Using Downloading Vault Inventory using the REST API, I put this together:
C:\>aws glacier initiate-job --account-id - --vault-name my_poorly_named_vault --job-parameters '{"Type": "inventory-retrieval"}'

Which returned:

Unknown options: inventory-retrieval}'

I had taken the command directly from AWS’s example:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/glacier/initiate-job.html.

(Keep in mind that I had already followed the steps at Installing the Amazon Web Services Command Line Interface and Configuring the Amazon Web Services Command Line Interface.)

According to the documentation for the job-parameters option (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdkforruby/api/Aws/Glacier/Types/JobParameters.html#type-instance_method),
valid values are “archive-retrieval” and “inventory-retrieval”.

But the error message says inventory-retrieval}’. Why is it picking up the trailing curly brace and the apostrophe?

I formatted the job-parameters JSON in a file named aws-json.txt, with the curly braces on separate lines:

{
    "Type": "inventory-retrieval"
}

I tried this variation on the initiate-job command:
C:\>aws glacier initiate-job --account-id - --vault-name my_poorly_named_vault --job-parameters file://aws-json.txt

That worked!

The results returned:

{
    "jobId": "y8ugyoNzzusaf6Lv72G3hsjAA6O7nw5bJQ2u6J9TDnJ82_qx-lxnqrhSxIcGvOU1iiXoUhZboiojxsDu8gLQOfiJ7hR2",
    "location": "/123456789011/vaults/my_poorly_named_vault/jobs/y8ugyoNzzusaf6Lv72G3hsjAA6O7nw5bJQ2u6J9TDnJ82_qx-lxnqrhSxIcGvOU1iiXoUhZboiojxsDu8gLQOfiJ7hR2"
}

Connecting to Oracle instance in AWS RDS

I inherited a development Oracle instance in Amazon Web Services’s Relational Database Service (AWS RDS) from a former colleague. I wanted to know what was in the database, and for that, I had to connect to it. I decided the most straightforward way would be with the simplest tool: SQL*Plus.
Continue reading Connecting to Oracle instance in AWS RDS