Connection Refused to my Running Amazon EC2 instance

Question

I created a micro ec2 instance. Installed all the necessary web software, mysql and git. Created an AMI out of that instance. Since that instance was using EBS as its root device, it took an EBS snapshot as well when I was creating my AMI.

I terminated that running instance. I then tried creating an instance out that amazon machine image (AMI), the new instance started along with a new EBS volume getting attached to the instance.

Now when I use my key pair to login to that instance via my ssh key to its public DNS address with a command as

ssh -i aws/mykey.pem ubuntu@thepublicdnsname 

it says

ssh: connect to host <thepublickdnsname> port 22: Connection refused 

Why is this happening. I was able to connect to my first instance with the same keys via ssh. Now the new instance is the exact copy and im not able to login to it. Any help on this ... ? Am I missing something?

I used the same key pairs to create the second new instance from the AMI.

Answer 1

I found that it takes variable amount of time for an EC2 instance to come up and get initialized. One is the time between calling ec2-run-instances till the instance state changes from "pending" to "running". After that there is additional time when ssh server becomes ready. That time can be a couple of minutes.

Answer 2

I had the same issue: my problem was that I had a volume attached to my instance, then I detached the volume and deleted it. I followed aws docs to mount my instance and edited /etc/fstab. This was the problem: when the volume is detached and you try to reboot (or stop and start) the instance it goes to this file and tries to attach the nonexistent volume and ssh daemon is not started.

The solution is: I had to create another instance, detach the volume from problematic instance then edit the mounted_point/etc/fstab file to comment the line where its trying to mount the nonexistent instance, the reattach volume to problematic instance and then it worked everything fine.