[chef] Knife ec2 failing on sshd

[Michael Lindsay < >]

Hello everyone… 

I’m attempting my first knife ec2 create commands for building instances inside a VPC.  

The problem I'm facing is that "Waiting for sshd access to become available...." Never completes.  What's weird (and flies in the face of what I thought was going on) is that while I'm watching little dots appear, in another terminal window on the same workstation, using the same identity file, user, and I think hostname (EIP) that the knife command is using, I CAN ssh into the instance.

Any ideas what might cause this?

 - Michael