SSH to EC2 linux instance from Windows

Question

I'm setting up a "data analysis on the cloud" class and most of the students will probably be using Windows.

The students will have to set up EC2 Ubuntu instances and connect to them.

What is the easiest way to set up SSH for Windows XP-7?

I've tried PuTTY but Puttygen can only convert the public key to putty format if I manually add newlines in a text editor. This is too involved for the class of 80.

I've tried OpenSSH but I can't seem to find the correct permissions for the public key file. On Mac OS/Linux it's just chmod 600.

Is there a decent SSH client that supports Amazon's key format that I can set up easily?

Answer 1

The .pem file Amazon Web Services gives you is supported by the openssh client implementations, but for a Windows-based client that works directly with the .pem file without converting it with puttygen.exe, look into Bitvise Tunnelier.

Answer 2

Another possible solution is to use PuTTY but follow Amazon's guide for doing so. I found some other guide's that weren't as clear in the steps but I was able to get PuTTYgen to work correctly when I used their guide.

1. Install PuTTY.
2. Follow Amazon's guide for converting your PEM file to the PuTTY PPK format.
3. Connect to your server!

As for newlines, maybe you need to run unix2dos or some other program that will fix that for you?

Answer 3

Step1: Download the keypair

The download will create a .pem file on your local system. It contains a private key that you can use to connect to the EC2 instance via SSH

Step 2: Launch your linux instance

Copy the public ip address for the future use to connect the linux instance

Step 3: Download puttyGen from https://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/w32/puttygen.exe

Step 4: Execute the PuttyGen exe and load the private key(the pem file you have downloaded while launching the instance)

Step 5: Save the private key, it will give the .ppk file which will be used to connect the linux instance

Step 6: Download and install the Putty software, open the putty, and paste the public ip address which you copied from the linux instance

Step 7: Now load the .PPK file which we have saved

Step 8: Choose yes from the alert window

Step 9: Login as ec-user

Answer 4

If anybody's looking for windows 10 solution.
In Windows 10, you can use powershell. Use above command.

ssh -i \..\location-to-pem-file.pem [email protected]

If ssh is not supported in your windows 10 machine, follow this url for installation.
I used it and suggested the same.