I’ve recently moved my blog on the Amazon EC2 cloud infrastructure which has been an interesting process (more posts coming !)
I’m also big biG bIG BIG fan of SSH host shortnames. However, being used to a keypair from the servers to manage ssh login and sftp transfers, I couldn’t work out how to connect using the default .pem file supplied by Amazon EC2. PEM – or privacy enhanced email – is another cert-based system see the ubiquitous Wikipedia article for more tech juice.
I downloaded my server .pem file to my local ssh directory (you can find this in your user directory called .ssh – notice that the prefix of . makes it invisible normally). I could then login via ssh using
ssh -i ~/.ssh/server.pem me@mariusv.com
but I’m to lazy to writte that long line 
. After some time of thinkig the solution hits me…
Replace server.pem with your .pem file in the following instructions
Copy your server.pem file to ~/.ssh
Open terminal and you’ll be in your user directory
Edit (or create) the file config with: vim ~/.ssh/config
Hit “i” to go into insert mode
Add: IdentityFile ~/.ssh/server.pem
Hit: :wq!
Change the permissions on your pem file with chmod 400 ~/.ssh/server.pem and you’re done!
Enjoy!
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