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For the past two mornings I have been unable to log into (establish an ssh connection) to an Amazon EC2 instance running the Bitnami node stack (based on Ubuntu) for several minutes.

After a few minutes of retrying I was able to log in via ssh. None of my browsers (on OSX) seems to want to use Java to load AWS's own web based console so I was unable to test if the problem is on my own machine.

The instance was listed as running in AWS console throughout and upon logging in. There was no high CPU usage (looked using top) or fill disk (df -k lists 27% usage).

I would like to know where to start looking in the logs to find out why I was unable to log in.

For clarity, I am logging in using terminal on OSX 10.8.5

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  • it's unclear what your asking, do you experience problem with logging by ssh ? or do you experience logging issue on your app ? – Kiwy Feb 5 '14 at 8:32
  • for clarity does your problem is a ssh connection problem ?? or an applicative login problem ? – Kiwy Feb 5 '14 at 12:51
  • @Kiwy sorry I dont understand the question. What does applicative login mean? If I am unable to make an ssh connection for a period of time but am then able to without any intervention from me, where would I look in the logs to see what prevented me from logging in? – codecowboy Feb 5 '14 at 15:01
  • You just answers but your question (except in an ambiguous title) never mention ssh and you're speaking of java embedded in browser which could make think of a problem logging in an application and not in the system with ssh – Kiwy Feb 5 '14 at 15:05
  • I think that the part None of my browsers (on OSX) seems to want to use Java to load AWS's own web based console so I was unable to test if the problem is on my own machine. is still quiet unclear, but now we know you want to debug ssh and the answer you get is a good start, problem is you don't know if you want to troubleshoot the ssh daemon or the virtual machine itself. – Kiwy Feb 5 '14 at 15:16
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You might try ssh -vvv user@server.com

From the man page:

-v    Verbose mode.  Causes ssh to print debugging messages about its progress.  This is
      helpful in debugging connection, authentication, and configuration problems.  
      Multiple -v options increase the verbosity.  The maximum is 3.
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If you're using PuTTY as an SSH client there is the "event log". Under windows the event log trigger appears in the context menu when you right-click the window handle (top bar) for your SSH session. This supplies similar info to the commandline -v switch.

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  • Thanks but I'm using OSX terminal – codecowboy Feb 5 '14 at 12:03

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