TPA - PuTTY Configuration guide v23

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In order to use PuTTY under Windows to connect via ssh to the AWS instances that were created by the TPA utility tpaexec provision, the keys will need to be converted from the private key format (.pem) generated by Amazon EC2 to the PuTTY format (.ppk).

# Provision the cluster
[tpa]$ tpaexec provision <clustername>

PuTTY has a tool named PuTTYgen, which can convert keys to the required format.

Key conversion

Locate private key

Locate the private key in the cluster directory <clustername> - it will be named according to the cluster_name variable set in config.yml prefixed by id_ - e.g. if the cluster_name is set to testenv1, then the private key will be called id_testenv1.

Save key as .pem

Copy this file into your Windows filesystem & save it as a .pem file - in this example id_testenv1.pem - cut and pasting into a text file will work fine for this.

Key conversion

Start PuTTYgen and under Parameters, select appropriate Type of key to generate:

For older versions of PuTTYgen, select SSH-2 RSA; for recent versions selectRSA

Do not select SSH-1 (RSA)

Now choose Load - in the box that says PuTTY Private Key Files (*.ppk) you will need to select All Files (*.*)

Select your .pem file and choose Open, then click OK.

Select Save private key and click Yes to ignore the warning about saving the key without a passphrase. Make sure that the file suffix is .ppk and choose the same name as for the .pem file; in this example the filename might be id_testenv1.ppk

Configure PuTTY

Start PuTTY and select Session from the Category window. In the Host Name panel, enter <user>@<IP address> and in the Port Panel, enter 22

The <user> and <IP address> can be found in the <clustername>/ssh_config file which gets created by the tpaexec provision utility.

In the Putty Category window, Select Connection, expand SSH and select Auth

For the panel marked Private key file for authentication, click Browse and select the .ppk file that was saved above, then select Open

In the Putty Category window, select Session again, enter a session name in Saved Sessions, and Save

You should now be able to connect to the AWS host via PuTTY by selecting this saved session.