How to recover key file for aws instance

    Posted in Amazon Cloud Services on Jun 05, 2018

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    If you lose the private key for an EBS-backed instance, you can regain access to your instance. You must stop the instance, detach its root volume and attach it to another instance as a data volume, modify the authorized_keys file, move the volume back to the original instance, and restart the instance. For more information about launching, connecting to, and stopping instances, see Instance Lifecycle.

    This procedure isn't supported for instance store-backed instances. To determine the root device type of your instance, open the Amazon EC2 console, choose Instances, select the instance, and check the value of Root device type in the details pane. The value is either ebs or instance store. If the root device is an instance store volume, you must have the private key in order to connect to the instance.

    Prerequisites

    Create a new key pair using either the Amazon EC2 console or a third-party tool. If you want to name your new key pair exactly the same as the lost private key, you must first delete the existing key pair.

    To connect to an EBS-backed instance with a different key pair

    1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

    2. Choose Instances in the navigation pane, and then select the instance that you'd like to connect to. (We'll refer to this as the original instance.)

    3. From the Details tab, save the following information that you'll need to complete this procedure.

      • Write down the instance ID, AMI ID, and Availability Zone of the original instance.
      • In the Root device field, take note of the device name for the root volume (for example, /dev/sda1 or /dev/xvda). Choose the link and write down the volume ID in the EBS ID field (vol-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx).
      • [EC2-Classic] If the original instance has an associated Elastic IP address, write down the Elastic IP address shown in the Elastic IP field in the details pane.
    4. Choose Actions, select Instance State, and then select Stop. If Stop is disabled, either the instance is already stopped or its root device is an instance store volume.

      Warning

    When you stop an instance, the data on any instance store volumes is erased. Therefore, if you have any data on instance store volumes that you want to keep, be sure to back it up to persistent storage.

    1. Choose Launch Instance, and then use the launch wizard to launch a temporary instance with the following options:

      • On the Choose an AMI page, select the same AMI that you used to launch the original instance. If this AMI is unavailable, you can create an AMI that you can use from the stopped instance. For more information, see Creating an Amazon EBS-Backed Linux AMI .
      • On the Choose an Instance Type page, leave the default instance type that the wizard selects for you.
      • On the Configure Instance Details page, specify the same Availability Zone as the instance you'd like to connect to. If you're launching an instance in a VPC, select a subnet in this Availability Zone.
      • On the Add Tags page, add the tag Name=Temporary to the instance to indicate that this is a temporary instance.
      • On the Review page, choose Launch. Create a new key pair, download it to a safe location on your computer, and then choose Launch Instances.
    2. In the navigation pane, choose Volumesand select the root device volume for the original instance (you wrote down its volume ID in a previous step). Choose Actions, and then select Detach Volume. Wait for the state of the volume to become available. (You might need to choose the Refresh icon.)

    3. With the volume still selected, choose Actions, and then select Attach Volume. Select the instance ID of the temporary instance, write down the device name specified under Device (for example, /dev/sdf), and then choose Yes, Attach.

    Note

    If you launched your original instance from an AWS Marketplace AMI and your volume contains AWS Marketplace codes, you must first stop the temporary instance before you can attach the volume.

    1. Connect to the temporary instance.
    2. From the temporary instance, mount the volume that you attached to the instance so that you can access its file system. For example, if the device name is /dev/sdf, use the following commands to mount the volume as /mnt/tempvol.

      Note The device name may appear differently on your instance. For example, devices mounted as /dev/sdf may show up as /dev/xvdf on the instance. Some versions of Red Hat (or its variants, such as CentOS) may even increment the trailing letter by 4 characters, where /dev/sdf becomes /dev/xvdk.

    Use the lsblk command to determine if the volume is partitioned.

        [ec2-user ~]$ lsblk
        NAME    MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
        xvda    202:0    0    8G  0 disk
        └─xvda1 202:1    0    8G  0 part /
        xvdf    202:80   0  101G  0 disk
        └─xvdf1 202:81   0  101G  0 part
        xvdg    202:96   0   30G  0 disk

    In the above example, /dev/xvda and /dev/xvdf are partitioned volumes, and /dev/xvdg is not. If your volume is partitioned, you mount the partition (/dev/xvdf1) instead of the raw device (/dev/xvdf) in the next steps.

    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo mkdir /mnt/tempvol

    Mount the volume (or partition) at the temporary mount point, using the volume name or device name you identified earlier.

    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo mount /dev/xvdf1 /mnt/tempvol

    From the temporary instance, use the following command to update authorized_keys on the mounted volume with the new public key from the authorized_keys for the temporary instance.

    Important

    The following examples use the Amazon Linux user name ec2-user. You may need to substitute a different user name, such as ubuntu for Ubuntu instances.

    **Important**
    
    The following examples use the Amazon Linux user name ec2-user. You may need to substitute a different user name, such as ubuntu for Ubuntu instances.
    
        [ec2-user ~]$ cp .ssh/authorized_keys /mnt/tempvol/home/ec2-user/.ssh/authorized_keys

    If this copy succeeded, you can go to the next step.

    (Optional) Otherwise, if you don't have permission to edit files in /mnt/tempvol, you'll need to update the file using sudo and then check the permissions on the file to verify that you'll be able to log into the original instance. Use the following command to check the permissions on the file:

    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo ls -l /mnt/tempvol/home/ec2-user/.ssh
    total 4
    -rw------- 1 222 500 398 Sep 13 22:54 authorized_keys

    In this example output, 222 is the user ID and 500 is the group ID. Next, use sudo to re-run the copy command that failed:

    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo cp .ssh/authorized_keys /mnt/tempvol/home/ec2-user/.ssh/authorized_keys

    Run the following command again to determine whether the permissions changed:

    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo ls -l /mnt/tempvol/home/ec2-user/.ssh

    If the user ID and group ID have changed, use the following command to restore them:

    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo chown 222:500 /mnt/tempvol/home/ec2-user/.ssh/authorized_keys

    From the temporary instance, unmount the volume that you attached so that you can reattach it to the original instance. For example, use the following command to unmount the volume at /mnt/tempvol:

    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo umount /mnt/tempvol

    From the Amazon EC2 console, select the volume with the volume ID that you wrote down, choose Actions, and then select Detach Volume. Wait for the state of the volume to become available. (You might need to choose the Refresh icon.)

    With the volume still selected, choose Actions, Attach Volume. Select the instance ID of the original instance, specify the device name you noted earlier for the original root device attachment (/dev/sda1 or /dev/xvda), and then choose Yes, Attach.

    • Important

    If you don't specify the same device name as the original attachment, you cannot start the original instance. Amazon EC2 expects the root device volume at sda1 or /dev/xvda.

    Select the original instance, choose Actions, select Instance State, and then choose Start. After the instance enters the running state, you can connect to it using the private key file for your new key pair.

    • Note

    If the name of your new key pair and corresponding private key file is different to the name of the original key pair, ensure that you specify the name of the new private key file when you connect to your instance.

    [EC2-Classic] If the original instance had an associated Elastic IP address before you stopped it, you must re-associate it with the instance as follows:

    • In the navigation pane, choose Elastic IPs.

    • Select the Elastic IP address that you wrote down at the beginning of this procedure.

    • Choose Actions, and then selectAssociate address.

    • Select the ID of the original instance, and then choose Associate.

    (Optional) You can terminate the temporary instance if you have no further use for it. Select the temporary instance, choose Actions, select Instance State, and then choose Terminate.