… without pasting your private key to ec2.
EC2 should never see your private key… because.. security!
I launched a Windows Server 2012 R2 instance in EC2 recently and while the AWS console does let you retrieve an Administrator password, it requires you to paste your PRIVATE key to AWS console to do it. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, so I learned how to use boto to get the encrypted password data and openssl cmdline to decrypt it to get the password.
Its a 2 step process with maybe the zeroth step being writing a .boto file with your aws credentials if you have never used boto.
import boto
import base64
ec2 = boto.connect_ec2()
inst = ec2.get_all_instances()[0].instance
data = ec2.get_password_data(inst.id)
open(‘ec2-admin-password’,’w’,write(base64.decodestring(data))
I’m assuming its the only instance running. If you have lots of others, use a list comprehension with if clause to filter to one on the get_all_instances() call, or just skip that call and paste an id string you see in AWS console for inst.id in the get_password_data call.
openssl rsautil -in ec2-admin-password -inkey .ssh/id_rsa -decrypt
You’ll be prompted for your private key password (and you MUST have a password. ssh-agent is easy) and then the Administrator password will be output to stdout.