Amazon now recommends you connect to new E2 server instances using the user “ec2-user”. That’s great but what about when you need to perform actions that require root permissions. I spent some time trying to figure out what the default root password is, but turns out you don’t actually need to know. Just do this: Root super powers will then [...]

My ssh connection to some Amazon instances stopped working after I moved around the elastic IP. I got a “Host key verification failed” error. The following fixed the problem. This removes the offending entry from ~/.ssh/known_hosts which was apparently causing ssh to fail.