Bees just can't complete their mission

[RobQlder]

New to bees and have done quite a bit of googling but cannot find out why my bees won't fire their guns!

They setup easily enough
bees up -s 2 -g BeesSecGroup -l beekeeper -i ami-fd489d9e -k KeyPair -z ap-southeast-1a

bees attack -n 5 -c 5 -u "http://siteURL/"
This attack fails with a 403 forbidden - so maybe something funky in CloudFlare based on other posts?

bees attack -n 5 -c 5 -u "http://elbIP/"
If I use the ELB IP then it starts but just cannot execute, little buggers are hippies apparently based on the message I get back.

Read 2 bees from the roster.
Connecting to the hive.
Assembling bees.
Each of 2 bees will fire 2 rounds, 2 at a time.
Stinging URL so it will be cached for the attack.
Organizing the swarm.
Bee 0 is joining the swarm.
Bee 1 is joining the swarm.
Offensive complete.
2 of your bees didn't make it to the action. They might be taking a little longer than normal to find their machine guns, or may have been terminated without using "bees down".
No bees completed the mission. Apparently your bees are peace-loving hippies.
The swarm is awaiting new orders.

things I have tried

1. pip install git+git://github.com/newsapps/beeswithmachineguns.git
2. different sites
3. confirmed bee is available in AWS console
4. different AMI images for bees
5. logging into a bee and using curl to confirm I can retrieve a GET response from a site

bit stuck at this point any help would be appreciated, seems like a cool tool.

[red-bin]

I was having the same issue, and it was from a problem related to the security group.

As charming as they are, the errors weren't very helpful in troubleshooting..

[RobQlder]

Thanks for the response, can you provide a few more details about how you resolved the issue. What change did you make to your security group?

[FliesLikeABrick]

@RobQlder I recommend SSHing to one of the instances manually after you execute your 'bees up' command, and running the 'ab' command on the instance (not just a curl). See if the command fails and how. It makes sense that if curl or wget worked, ab should have no issues - but that would be the next thing to try.

[tylerbrandt]

I have the same issue. However, it doesn't seem to happen when I wait a while between bees up and bees attack. It seems to be related to the "Status Check" in AWS, which starts out as "Initializing" and eventually reads "2/2 checks passed" (after a minute or two). If this is indeed the problem, maybe up could accept an arg to wait for this latter state (or do so by default)?