Search code examples
sshamazon-ec2pki

Can't log into Amazon EC2 Instance with key pair

I can connect to my Amazon EC2 instance via the pem file that I've been given.

I do something like this 

ssh -i <mykeyname>.pem ubuntu@<myexternalip>

and it works ok.

But now I need a passwordless login to my instance, so I create a key pair as shown here and send my .pub file to my remote instance and put it under the .ssh directory with the name authorized_keys but I still can't connect!

I keep getting an error message:

Permission denied (publickey).

Could anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Are all other forms of logging in (apart from .pem files) disallowed by default on EC2 Instances?

thanks in advance.

Solution

  • It turns out it wasn't an SSH problem at all. The problem was that, when I call sudo, i forgot that the user changes to root... and obviously I hadn't set up keys for the root user so it kept failing on me...

    I solved it by using sudo -u actual_user instead.

    Thanks to cmn on git@freenode for helping me see this.