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Dave Van den Eynde
Asked: 2011-03-17 22:05:31 +0800 CST

How to determine default password of an EC2 Windows Server Core instance?

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Amazon recently introduced Windows Server 2008 R2 Core as an available image in EC2. I'm excited about this, but there is no documentation on how to get started.

For instance, how does one retrieve the default password for one of these instances?

amazon-ec2

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I've not actually used a windows instance myself, however i found this link:- http://techgurulive.com/2011/03/07/how-to-get-windows-password-amazon-ec2-instance/

    • Right-click an instance and click Get Windows Password. The Retrieve Default Windows Administrator password dialog box appears.
    • Paste your private key into the provided field and click Decrypt Password. Amazon EC2 returns an encrypted version of the Windows Administrator password. Your private key is used to decrypt the password locally. Your private key will never be transmitted over the network.

    Can't verify this though.

    The amazon docs themsels have this: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/CommandLineReference/index.html?ApiReference-cmd-GetPassword.html

    Which means you can get it using 

    ec2-get-password i-2574e22a -k windows-keypair.pem

    using the developer api tools.

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  2. I solved the problem by terminating the instance and launching a new one. Now, the password was easily retrievable.

    Whether this is a problem that can occur to anywone, or exists because the AMI is really new and still under supervision, I don't know, but this solved it.

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