Whilst I’ve been attempting to learn a new thing each month this year, I’ve been finding it really tricky to keep to the pretty loose schedule. As such, I though I’d try and note down every time a shiny new thing takes my interest, so that I have some idea why I’m incapable of completing a series of blog posts.

Accessing EC2 from a phone running ConnectBot

The ppk you use for putty/kitty/ssh doesn’t work on connectbot so you need to generate a new one from within the phone (connectbot app) and copy it over to your EC2 instance, appending it to your authorised keys file.

Generating the key

Go and install the app from the android store.

Find the app on your phone:

Generate a new key from the Manage Keys page:

Getting your file to your EC2 instance

Firstly, copy the public key to clipboard:

Then get it to your phone. There are a few ways of doing this; I pasted it into a new text file via my phone’s dropbox app and then curl-ed/wget-ed that file on to my EC2 instance (obviously logging in from a PC).

Adding it to your authorised keys

First I backed the existing authorized_keys file up:

cp ~/.ssh/authorized_keys backup_auth

Then I appended the one generated from my phone:

cat s3_id_dsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

You can now log in directly from your phone without using a login:

Instigator
— needing to restart Apache whilst AFK