GCE: cannot login, The VM guest environment is outdated and only supports the deprecated 'sshKeys' metadata item

Question

I cannot ssh into my Google Compute Engine (GCE) Wordpress instance anymore. It was working one month ago when I tried last. I use the Google built-in SSH client in a Chrome browser window. Yesterday I tried an got the following message:

The VM guest environment is outdated and only supports the deprecated 'sshKeys' metadata item. Please follow the steps here to update.

The "Steps here" link navigates to https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/images/configuring-imported-images#install_guest_environment which does not seem to help me much.

I am not aware of any changes that I may have made.

How can I fix this?

Answer 1

If you're seeing this on Debian 8 or 9, the most likely reason for this is that the google-compute-engine.* packages that allow SSH access to the instance have been removed by apt-get autoremove.

If you have an open SSH connection to the machine or can use a tool like gcloud, running apt-get update && sudo apt-get install gce-compute-image-packages should fix this.

If you no longer have any SSH access, there is a procedure available on the GCP docs site that can be used to restore it.