Connect over ssh using a .pem file

I would like to know how to connect over ssh using a .pem file to any server.

Currently I'm executing the following command:

ssh

What option should I use?

7 Answers

Use the -i option:

ssh -i mykey.pem

As noted in this answer, this file needs to have correct permissions set. The ssh man page says:

ssh will simply ignore a private key file if it is accessible by others.

You can change the permissions with this command:

chmod go= mykey.pem

That is, set permissions for group and others equal to the empty list of permissions.

chmod 400 mykey.pem ssh -i mykey.pem

Will connect you over ssh using a .pem file to any server.

For AWS if the user is ubuntu use the following to connect to remote server.

chmod 400 mykey.pem ssh -i mykey.pem ubuntu@your-ip

To connect from Terminal to AWS AMI:

chmod 400 mykey.pem ssh -i mykey.pem

You can connect to a AWS ec-2 instance using the following commands.

chmod 400 mykey.pem ssh -i mykey.pem username@your-ip

by default the machine name usually be like ubuntu since usually ubuntu machine is used as a server so the following command will work in that case.

ssh -i mykey.pem ubuntu@your-ip

If you still got error messages like:

Received disconnect from 34.219.50.0 port 22:2: Too many authentication failures. Disconnected from 34.219.50.0 port 22

Edit your ssh config located at ~/.ssh/config and add new record at the end

Host mydomain.com User ubuntu IdentityFile /home/you/path-to-pem/key.pem IdentitiesOnly yes

what resolved it for me was to run: sudo chown $USER: {.pem_file}