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I have an Amazon EC2 Windows 2008 R2 server and I've been trying to get SSH working on it. I installed FreeSSHd after having numerous problems with CygWin/OpenSSH, but now I'm not sure how to load the public key from the instance. I can see under EC2 > Key Pairs that my key named "test" is there, but I can't find any option to download the public key. In the information about credentials, it says that the SSH public key is stored on the instance, but doesn't say how, and on the security credentials portal, it has some of my key pairs with 20 character IDs generated by AWS, but none are named "test" like the one associated with my instance. How can I find my public key on my EC2 server?
Edit:
An AWS Architect informed me that the public key is not saved/stored on a Windows Server, only on a Linux instance. So the answer is that the key used for decrypting the Remote Desktop password isn't anywhere on the server and a different key pair must be used for SSH.
low rep prevented me from posing all the links. so here's the documentation, and here's the link to EC2 Console
– tutuDajuju – 2012-07-12T20:56:10.743I had read the keypair documentation and looked in the EC2 console, and I have the private key on my personal computer, but I can't figure out how to download the public key. The "test" keypair has already been generated and I can use it to log in through Remote Desktop, but I'm not sure how to download/find the public key in a file on the server. – FlyingMolga – 2012-07-12T21:10:15.020
I'm not sure why you'd want to download the public key... The idea behind key-pair authentication is explained here. Amazon basically generates the key for you so you won't have to upload the public key to the EC2 machine but rather just download the private key to your machine (usually it's the other way around).
– tutuDajuju – 2012-07-12T21:15:58.697I need to connect to the server via SSH, and I'm trying to figure out how to load the key into an SFTP client so that I can authenticate. I don't need to take the public key off of the server, I just need to find the file on the server. – FlyingMolga – 2012-07-12T21:19:30.923
If you want to connect with SFTP from machine A (your PC) to machine B (EC2) then all you need to do is load the private key that you downloaded from AWS console into Pageant (get here), open WinSCP and login to machine B. If on the other hand you want to use machine B as the client and log-in to machine A or even C ... then you'll have to generate a key-pair on B and follow the instructions that I sent you in the comment above
– tutuDajuju – 2012-07-12T21:23:47.083WinSCP keeps saying "Server refused public-key signature despite accepting key!" Wouldn't the AWS public key need to be loaded into FreeSSHd? – FlyingMolga – 2012-07-16T14:13:06.700