Another I’m going to post because I’ll forget…I was messing around with Amazon EC2 and had some minor issues connecting using SSH and PuTTY. Here are the simple steps I used to connect to a CentOS EC2 instance.

Open SSH in the Security Groups section of AWS Management Console.

Download PuTTY and PuTTYgen. Open PuTTYgen and load the .pem key you downloaded from Amazon when you created the instance.

Save private key as “id_rsa-gsg-keypair.ppk”, ignore pass phrase prompt.

Open a command prompt and cd to the directory where your putty.exe is located.

“your-amazon-public-dns.amazonaws.com” is your own public DNS address that you can get from AWS Management Console under Instance Actions -> Connect.

You could of course use the PuTTY GUI and select the .ppk file.

I could login is a root with CentOS, but I’ve read this might be ec2-user or something else depending on the EMI you are using.