CreatingKeyPair

Creating a Key Pair

Amazon uses RSA public/private key pairs to regulate access to the instances you create. When you ask Amazon create these key-pairs, it will give you the private key but will itself keep only the public key. The public key is made available to the created instance via a special URL, and the instance's "init scripts" will retrieve the public key and put it in [some user]/.ssh/authorized_keys so that that you can log in as that user with the private key. This user will be something like "root", "admin" or "ubuntu".

Type kl-create-key mycluster:

# kl-create-key mycluster
bin/kl-create-key: creating key-pair with name mycluster, in ~/.ssh/mycluster.pem
bin/kl-create-key: creating public key in ~/.ssh/mycluster.pub
bin/kl-create-key: done creating ssh key

This script uses the command ec2-create-keypair to create a keypair; it takes the private key from the output and puts it in your .ssh directory which is where ssh keys are customarily kept, and it also gets the public key (using ssh command-line tools) and stores it in your .ssh directory also, because we'll need it later. If you want to delete this key from Amazon later, you can do so by typing:

ec2-delete-keypair mycluster

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