Our Support Techs suggest four methods to verify permissions and directories on the instance: Permissions issues on the instance or a missing directory ssh/authorized_keys file permissions to 600, we run: $ chmod 600. Then we use the touch command to create the authorized_keys file in the. ssh directory’s permissions to 700, we use the chmod command: $ chmod 700. ssh directory in the new_user home directory: $ mkdir. After that, for folders and files to have the correct permissions we change the security context to the new_user account: $ sudo su - new_userĤ. In the case of an Ubuntu instance, we include the –disabled-password option to avoid adding a password to the new account: $ sudo adduser new_user -disabled-passwordģ. Here, we replace the new_user with the new account name. Then we use the adduser command: $ sudo adduser new_user To do so, we connect to the Linux instance via SSH.Ģ. In case the user was deleted from the server, we add the user back as a new user.ġ. The user was deleted from the server or the account was locked

However, if the ec2-user and root don’t work, we check with the AMI provider. The appropriate user names are as follows: For Amazon Linux 2 or the Amazon Linux AMI: ec2-user. Suppose we get this error while we use PuTTY to connect, then we verify that we connect with the appropriate user name for the AMI. Moving ahead, let us see how our Support Techs fix this error in different scenarios.

The operating system couldn’t mount (/etc/fstab) home directories.

Change in SSH server settings in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.

An incorrect private key file for the EC2 instance.

Permissions issues on the instance or a missing directory.

The user we try to access the instance was deleted from the server or the account was locked.

An incorrect user name for the AMI while connecting to the EC2 instance.

The following are some common reasons you might receive this error:

There are multiple reasons why an SSH server (sshd) refuses a private SSH key. Today, let us see how we can fix this error. Here, at Bobcares, we assist our customers with several AWS queries as part of our AWS Support Services. We may come across this error while we connect to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance using SSH. Stuck with the error, EC2 Server refused our key? We can help you.

Server refused our key filezilla