AWS EC2 Connection closed by when trying ssh into instance

Question

Recently I set up a new EC2 instance. The next day I was not able to connect to my instance via ssh. I could connect and disconnect the day before, I am sure I did nothing.

Answer 1

Check your security group. Make sure that you have an outbound rule that allows traffic to return from the instance.

With the default outbound rule

type: All traffic, Protocol: All, Ports: All, Destination: 0.0.0.0/0

it will work.

Answer 2

Please check your username. if you are using ubuntu instance try using "ubuntu" in username instead of "ec2-user", and vice-versa

Answer 3

(1) Please check when you execute the ssh command, are you in the same folder where you put your pem key. Else you should use "ssh -i /your_key_path /mykey.pem".

(2) If that doesn't help. I think you could create another key and set your EC2 instance through AWS webpage. Then try again.

Answer 4

My problem was that the username was incorrect. On ubuntu instances it should be "ubuntu" and on amazon instances it should be "ec2-user".

Answer 5

I had the same issue, Its the problem of the permissions you give to pem private key file. Make sure you run ssh command in the terminal with the sudo (Administrative) Access.

Answer 6

I had this problem and it turned out the PEM file was incorrect. You can check following the instructions in Amazon EC2 Key Pairs - Verifying Your Key Pair's Fingerprint:

If you created your key pair using AWS, you can use the OpenSSL tools to generate a fingerprint from the private key file:

$ openssl pkcs8 -in path_to_private_key -inform PEM -outform DER -topk8 -nocrypt | openssl sha1 -c

If you created your key pair using a third-party tool and uploaded the public key to AWS, you can use the OpenSSL tools to generate a fingerprint from the private key file on your local machine:

$ openssl rsa -in path_to_private_key -pubout -outform DER | openssl md5 -c

The output should match the fingerprint that's displayed in the console.