How do I SCP file between two Amazon EC2 server?

Question

I am on Amazon AWS and I have two EC2 instance on my account. Trying to send rsa key via SSH to another EC2 instance using internal private IP. But its not working.

scp -i .ssh/id_rsa.pub xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/root/.ssh/authorized_keys2

What am I doing wrong and how do I send file to another EC2 account with ssh.

Answer 1

This won't completely replace the authorized_keys file, so you can continue logging in with previous access:

cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh -i key.pem USER@x.x.x.x 'cat >>.ssh/authorized_keys'

where "USER" might be "root", "ec2-user", or "ubuntu", depending on the AMI you are running.

Or, just start your EC2 instances using your personal ssh keys in the first place. Here's an article I wrote about that:

Uploading Personal ssh Keys to Amazon EC2
http://alestic.com/2010/10/ec2-ssh-keys

Answer 2

You are probably using the 10.x.x.x-ip of the instance. This won't work. Use the external path. (something like ec2-75-102-166-16.compute-1.amazonaws.com). Or attach an elastic IP to it and use that.

Answer 3

Here the scp format:

scp -i <key> <what_to_copy> <where_to_copy>

You are missing <what_to_copy> in the example.

Also check the security group of the target server. It should allow the connections either the the security group of the source sever or from the 10.0.0.0/8 network.