EC2 Bare Minimum

1. install ec2 tools
   cd ~/.ec2
   ssh -i /Users/XXX/.ec2/ec2.pem ec2-user@ec2-XXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com
   sudo yum install screen (why?)
2. For moving data to & from the EC2 instance, simply use scp which runs on top of ssh like so:
3. A lot of images will flunk all ssh connection attempts! It seems like this has nothing to do with the permissions on the pem file that you use to connect to them or opening up port 22 by default in their security policies. They just don't work even after all that, all the attempts spit out:
   
   • either, Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic)
   • or, Net::SSH::AuthenticationFailed
   So don't waste your time on them! Here's a small list of useless ones that you should avoid:
   • ami-31d41658, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, x86_64
   • ami-8f4083e6, RHEL-5.6-Starter-EBS-x86_64-11-Hourly2