[chef] knife-ec2 - SSH connection is failing after starting EC2 instance successfully

[Fabien Delpierre < >]

Hi there,

I'm running a knife ec2 server create command that looks like this:
knife ec2 server create --associate-public-ip -N 'foo' --ebs-volume-type gp2 -E foo-prod -f t2.small -i ~/.ssh/prod1.pem -I ami-b66ed3de --region us-east-1 -r 'recipe[foo]' -g sg-56530433,sg-5547b331 -S prod1 -s subnet-1f9eac37 --ssh-user ec2-user

After creating the instance successfully, it gets stuck on this line:

"Waiting for sshd access to become available".

I've tried waiting several minutes for sshd to become "available" while I SSH into the same instance manually in a separate terminal, so I know I can get to the instance from my machine.

My hunch is that it's trying to connect to the public DNS name of the instance, which isn't going to work in my situation, I need it to connect to the private IP.

I'm sorry if I missed it in the knife ec2 help, but is there a way to tell it to connect using the private IP, not the public one?

Or what else can I do? Provision the instance without a public IP so knife-ec2 will be forced to use the private IP to do its thing, and then add the EIP myself? I'm fine with that in this case because it's a one-off, but then this begs the question: how could I do it if I really needed this to be fully automated and to work on a large scale?

Thanks!

Fabien