Amazon EC2 SSH – Fix Connection Issues to Amazon EC2 Over SSH

amazon ec2ssh

I've created an Amazon EC2 AMI from an existing server, ie I'm not using one of amazon's AMIs. I can launch it and I can see on the console output that it's started up, however I can't SSH to it, either as root or as a local user that was on the original server we copied.

I've tried with a few different keys, including some that i had made already. When I try to connect, it offers the SSH key but it doesn't except that and will ask me for a password. I tried the (root) password for that server. "PermitRootLogin yes" is in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config

I know I'm connecting to the SSH server, since it gives me the RSA fingerprint the first time. I've tried running this on US and EU.

Any ideas?

Best Answer

This is my fault. I forgot to add 'root' to the AllowGroups in sshd config.

Related Solutions

Linux – root login via SSH still enabled after setting PermitRootLogin to ‘no’

Did you reload or restart sshd? Your sshd may still be using the old setting otherwise.

Linux – Can’t SSH into Amazon EC2

Most likely you have this in your /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

PermitRootLogin no

This is a good thing, however. If you want to perform privileged actions, you should do them with sudo or at least start a root shell with sudo -s.

There will likely be a reason for the failed login in /var/log/auth.log on the server. It doesn't look like you put the public key in /root/.ssh/authorized_keys on your server, which is where it needs to be for root to log in.

Buried in the fine print here is the titbit that the default user is admin, not root in the Debian AMI. That's where Amazon will have put the public key that matches the private key you downloaded. Use this:

ssh -i /Users/James/Documents/sshkeys/aws.pem admin@myec2ip

The default user is ec2-user in the Amazon AMI and ubuntu in the Ubuntu AMI. I don't know about any others.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – root login via SSH still enabled after setting PermitRootLogin to ‘no’

Linux – Can’t SSH into Amazon EC2

Related Topic