Accessing my Debian Server - Why, oh, why Debian

My next goal was to try and remotely log in to the server as the root user (or administrator), of my Debian Squeeze instance on AWS.

I needed to access this through a command line interface, which is vastly different to the prettied up graphical interface I am use to.

I was trying to connect via to my server via PuTTY using
root@ec2-54-84-52-230.compute-1.amazonaws.com as laid out in both the AWS User Guide and the Koha in 11 Minutes video. I followed these to the letter, but I kept getting the error below:

My first thought was that the the key I had downloaded to authenticate my access was somehow corrupted, so I started this step again, getting a new key. This yielded the same error, so I Googled the error message, and figured out found that I was probably not following the step pictured below.

I tried to look up my user name by finding the Debian Squeeze AMI again, but it provided no clues as to what it could be. My AMI did not list the root user name, as I had chosen an machine from the Community AMIs, and not the standard AMIs created by Amazon. Having figured this out, I attempted various user names suggested by Amazon Troubleshoot Page and Google, including: debian, ec2user, admin, and various others.

I tried Google my AMI, but could find no more information of any use. After about 3 hours of frustration, I realised it would be quicker to just give up and use another Linux AMI.

I learned that perseverance is good trait to have, but there is only so much you can do before it becomes more worthwhile to try something else. In other words, I learned when to change tactics, and try a different approach, and where to draw the line between perseverance and stubbornness. In future, I will look a few steps ahead in the process, and make sure I have all the appropriate information to complete the next step. This way I will not waste as much time attempting to do something that is simply not going to work.