How to setup SSH Access for Amazon EC2 instance?

Question

I need SSH access to an Amazon EC2 instance running Ubuntu 10.4. All I got is the amazon username and password. Any ideas?

Answer 1

ssh -i /path/to/private-key ubuntu@<ec2-public-dns-address>

just use ubuntu instead of root. Your problem will be solved. Cheers!

Answer 2

Not logging in as the correct user for you OS Distro could be the issue. For certain new AMI, the username may not be "ubuntu", but "ec2-user". For Amazon Linux, for instance I believe the user is "ec2-user". Eric Hammond gives examples here: http://alestic.com/2014/01/ec2-ssh-username

My suggestion, try:

ssh -i /path/to/file.pem ec2-user@ec2...

ssh -i /path/to/file.pem ubuntu@ec2...

ssh -i /path/to/file.pem root@ec2...

If you have the wrong AMI, you might just want to restart the machine altogether so you have uniformity amongst your clusters. If this is your problem, you'll probably want the same OS Distro's at least for your linux boxes.

Answer 3

Make sure these thing in check

1. private key must have 400 permission

2. Make sure port 22 is open for AWS instance you are trying to access.

3. ssh -i privatekey.pem [e-mail] // XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX = your instance public ip

Answer 4

1) First chmod the .pem file for restricting the file permissons as below

chmod 400 my-key-pair.pem

2)Then ssh with the following commands directly from .ssh folder

ssh -i my-key-pair.pem [e-mail]

Note:- To navigate into .ssh folder. First press Ctrl + H to display all the hidden files and finallycd .ssh

Answer 5

If you are using MacOS, you should create/edit SSH configuration file (~/.ssh/config) and put something like:

Host *.amazonaws.com
    User ubuntu
    Port 22
    StrictHostKeyChecking no
    UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null
    IdentityFile ~/PATH/YOUR_DOWNLOADED_KEY.pem

Then to connect to any of EC2 instances:

ssh MYNAME.amazonaws.com

Nothing more!

Answer 6

Note, the current user for 13.04 is "ubuntu" ssh -i ./mykey.pem [e-mail]