Logging into your computer instance “in the cloud” (NON-Windows version; for Mac and Linux)

These instructions are written for a Mac operating system, but they should work for Linux once you open your terminal program as well.

I will step through this process using a Mac at the beginning of the workshop.

Connecting using the key and SSH

You’ll be provided with the network name, a.k.a. public DNS, of your virtual machine. This is the public name of your computer on the internet. It will look something like ec2-174-129-122-189.compute-1.amazonaws.com, for example.

Connect to your particular virtual computer with ssh under the username ubuntu, as follows.

If you prepared in advance, the key provided for today should be on your Desktop already.

Next, start Terminal (,on a Mac it is in Applications > Utilities,) and type:

chmod og-rwx ~/Desktop/workshop.pem

to set the permissions on the private key file to “closed to all evildoers”. SSH will be protective and won’t allow you to connect if you skip this step. You only ever need to do this once for each key on your computer.

Next type:

ssh -i ~/Desktop/workshop.pem ubuntu@ec2-???-???-???-???.compute-1.amazonaws.com

(but you have to replace the stuff after the ‘@’ sign with the network name of the computer that is provided to you. You may wish to open your text editor and paste the template in the text editor for editing if it makes it easier for you because you can point and click there.)

With the above command, you’re using ssh to log in as user ubuntu to the machine ec2-174-129-122-189.compute-1.amazonaws.com, for an example name, using the authentication key located in workshop.pem, a.k.a. the identity file prefaced by the -i option in the command, on your Desktop.

The first time you try this on your own computer it will say that it cannot establish the authenticity of the machine you are trying to connect to and ask if you’d like to conitue. Simply type yes at the prompt and the Amazon machine instance will be added to the list of known hosts on your computer.

$ yes

Some information should scroll by and at the bottom you should now see a text line that starts with something like ubuntu@ip-10-235-34-223:~$. You’re now officially connected to the machine at Amazon Web Services. Hooray! But you have have one last, IMPORTANT step to totally take control.

Type:

sudo bash
cd /usr/workshop

The first command restarts the bash shell with you using the machine as the super user and the second sets you in the directory where we will work today usr/workshop. You have to issue these commands each time you login; these settings don’t persist.

This is where we will begin today and it after this it will be much like you are working on your own computer’s command line.

OPTIONAL: To check out what you have you can type the command below to see

df -h

Exiting

(You probably won’t need to do this today.)

To log out, type:

exit
logout

or just close the terminal or Putty window. (You cannot do this step wrong because ultimately you (or me, for today) have control of the instance in Amazon Web Services console.)