Why can't I ssh into my new EC2 Instance?

Try ssh [email protected] -i your-private.key, instead of ssh-adding the key.

Oh, and make sure you allowed TCP port 22 through the Security Group.

Does the security group (firewall configuration) allow SSH access?

More specifically - on the AWS management console page, select Security Groups in the left panel (towards the bottom) On the bottom-right panel, select "Inbound" tab, and make sure "Custom TCP rule" is selected. Enter 22 for the port number, click the "Add rule" button, then the "apply rule changes" button. No need to restart or reboot your instance, just need to enable TCP port 22 inbound

Try using either root or ec2-user as the username.

You need to open the ssh access to you instances with a ec2-authorize default -p 22 command. Have you done this?

This has been happening to me on some of my EC2 boxes. In general, it appears that if a process is taking all the processor or is behaving badly and you get disconnected, SSH might not be able to pick up when you try to reconnect. Rebooting the box through AWS console often helps.

It is also possible to launch an instance without associating it with a keypair. You might double check that when you launched your instance, you did so with the keypair you intended. If the instance launched with the wrong keypair, you'll need to relaunch your instance.

Try

ssh -i ~/.ssh/mir.pem [email protected]

where the x's are your public ip

To login to your AMI box you use the ec2-user. This means you would use the following to login: ssh -i mir.pem ec2-user@public_dns to login.