Unable to remote desktop into a Amazon EC2 instance

Question

I have a website running on a Windows 2008 Server EC2 instance. The website is working fine, but I'm unable to remote-desktop into it.

I have an Elastic IP associated with the instance:

# telnet 999.99.999.999 80
Trying 999.99.999.999...
Connected to ec2-999-99-999-999.compute-1.amazonaws.com (999.99.999.999).
Escape character is '^]'.
helo
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Mon, 09 Aug 2010 08:39:34 GMT
Connection: close

0

Connection closed by foreign host.

---

# telnet 999.99.999.999 3389
Trying 999.99.999.999...
telnet: connect to address 999.99.999.999: Connection timed out
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection timed out

---

# telnet ec2-994-996-996-992.compute-1.amazonaws.com 80
Trying 994.996.996.992...
telnet: connect to address 994.996.996.992: Connection timed out
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection timed out

---

Remote Desktop protocol (3389) IS allowed for the instance's security group:

RDP tcp 3389    3389    0.0.0.0/0   --

Answer 1

I had been working away, trying to resolve this problem for the last hour and a half before I posted on SF and finally I figured out the issue!

The default password in cleartext had a 'c' in it, which when viewed in notepad, looked like an UPPERCASE 'C' to me... and I had been trying that all this while!

Moreover Remote Desktop in Windows doesn't seem to allow copy-pasting username/passwords anymore, so that definitely made matters much worse for me!