SSH to Amazon EC2 instance using PuTTY in Windows

Question

I am a newbie to Amazon web services, was trying to launch an Amazon instance and SSH to it using putty from windows. These are the steps I followed:

1. Created a key pair.

2. Added a security group rule for SSH and HTTP.

3. Launched and instance of EC2 using the above key pair and security group.

4. Using PuTTYgen converted the *.pem file to *.ppk

5. Using putty tried connecting to the public DNS of the instance and provided the *.ppk file.

I logged in using 'root' and 'ec2-user', and created the PPK file using SSH1 and SSH2, for all these attempts I get the following error in putty,

"Server refused our key"

Can you guys please help, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I assume that the OP figured this out or otherwise moved on, but the answer is to use ubuntu as the user (if the server is ubuntu).

Answer 2

1) Make sure you have port 22 (SSH) opened in Security Group of EC2 Instance.

2) Try connecting with Elastic IP instead of public DNS name.

I hope you have followed these steps Connecting EC2 from a Windows Machine Using PuTTY

Answer 3

Another situation where I got the "Server refused our key" error when using putty, from windows, to ssh to an EC2 instance running ubuntu:

The private key was wrongly converted from .pem to .ppk.

puttygen has two options for "converting keys".

1. Load your .pem file into puttygen using the File->Load Private Key option and then save as .ppk file using the Save Private Key Button.
2. DO NOT use the menu option Conversions->Import Key to load the .pem file generated by EC2.

   See the puttygen screenshots below, with the two menu options marked.