Permissions error when connecting to EC2 via SSH on Mac OSx

Question

I am new to EC2. I created my security credentials from this site:

http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-getting-started-with-amazon-ec2

It worked great, I rebooted and now when I try to connect I get a login/password prompt. (Which I never set up.) After several attempts I get this error:

Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-with-mic).

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Two possibilities I can think of, although they are both mentioned in the link you referenced:

1. You're not specifying the correct SSH keypair file or user name in the ssh command you're using to log into the server:

   ssh -i [full path to keypair file] root@[EC2 instance hostname or IP address]

2. You don't have the correct permissions on the keypair file; you should use

   chmod 600 [keypair file]

to ensure that only you can read or write the file.

Try using the -v option with ssh to get more info on where exactly it's failing, and post back here if you''d like more help.

[Update]: OK, so this is what you should have seen if everything was set up properly:

debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,gssapi-with-mic debug1: Next authentication method: publickey debug1: Trying private key: ec2-keypair debug1: read PEM private key done: type RSA debug1: Authentication succeeded (publickey). 

Are you running the ssh command from the directory containing the ec2-keypair file ? If so, try specifying -i ./ec2-keypair just to eliminate path problems. Also check "ls -l [full path to ec2-keypair]" file and make sure the permissions are 600 (displayed as rw-------). If none of that works, I'd suspect the contents of the keypair file, so try recreating it using the steps in your link.