Everything has been going swimmingly as I work my way through the exercises in this excellent resource; however, I am unable to make ssh work in Cygwin in order to connect to my AWS instance. Any clues? Thanks! :dj

I haven't tried Cygwin but in the past I successfully connected to an AWS instance using PuTTY from a Windows OS. I found this blog post helpful when I was struggling getting SSH to work.

You might check firewall settings for an installed firewall, to make sure it giving cygwin full permissions.

Thanks for the posts, cman123 & jhrobbin. I couldn't see any firewall issues, so I downloaded PuTTY and got a bit farther along with the help of the blog that jhrobbin referenced.

Now it seems that I can login to default AMI instances with PuTTY SSH, but when I try to login to an Ubuntu instance via Alestic, my key private key is not accepted by the server. Any clues?

I'm also wondering if there's some way to start nginx on a non-Ubuntu instance. Has anyone tried that? Thanks! :dj

I assume you are using the right private key. You also need to use the right user name with your key as follows:

ubuntu - for ubuntu servers
ec2-user - for Amazon provided AMIs

How do you get past

When you have put yourkey.pem in that directory?

I got past that. Now I am stuck on the ssh key command: I answer "yes" and I get "permission denied(publickey)" after it tells me it is now saving the ec-2blahblah as a permanent whatchamacallit.

I found that ssh is not included in the default cygwin install.

Once I chose a mirror site and was in the "select packages" dialog box, I typed "openssh" into the search box. The package that contains it was shown. I clicked on it and set it to install the binary for the ssh command in addition to the default install.

I also found that in cygwin I had to change the "apt-get install nginx" command in the book to "aptitude install nginx".

Later on, I had to do a chmod 755 on the draw folder and the draw.html and draw.js files before I could successfully run the app from the ec2 instance.