How missing a ‘>’ killed my EC2 machine and how I brought it back to life

After spending a number of hours configuring an EC2 machine

id_rsa.pub > authorised_keys

id_rsa.pub >> authorised_keys

Panic!

Just lost all the configuration. To make matters worse, I hadn’t done a push to github. Was I just about to lose all my effort?

Thankfully, with some black magic I got the box back. One of the beautys of EC2 is the AMI. Exact machine images, yet modified with your own private key at create – exactly what I needed.

Stop machine

Create Image

Update with private key

Start.

IT WORKED LIKE A DREAM!

Couple of things like the hostname had been changed, but apart from that it was back and with all the configuration as I felt it – yet I could login. Wonderful.

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