A few months ago when I wanted to log into my EC2 Fedora 8 instance, Putty as well as the Terminal in OS X started greeting me with the message ‘Server refused to allocate pty’. Apparently the new version of the EC2 Bundling files had changed the FSTAB file which caused this error to occur.

The only way I was able to connect to the server was with SCP and the Windows client WinSCP actually somehow managed to give me SSH access. For some reason I post-poned this fix for the longest time and just used WinSCP’s SSH access, but 3 days ago I decided to do something about it. First, I backed up my /etc/fstab file and used WinSCP to edit it to say:

/dev/sda1               /                       ext3    defaults 1 1
/dev/sda2               /mnt                    ext3    defaults 0 0
/dev/sda3               swap                    swap    defaults 0 0
none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults 0 0
none                    /proc                   proc    defaults 0 0
none                    /sys                    sysfs   defaults 0 0

After that, just reboot your instance and you will be able to log in as usual again.

Tags: EC2, Fedora

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 3:54 pm and is filed under EC2. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.