SSH into EC2 instance: Operation timed out

Question

I'm trying to ssh into my ec2 instance in order to deploy my MEAN-stack app but no matter what I'm receiving a timeout error. I've tried so many solutions that were posted in other StackExchange threads but to no avail. I am running macOS 10.14.1

On my mac I've tried connecting via FileZilla, Cyberduck and even using command line arguments such as ssh -v -v -v -i "<pem-file-name>.pem" [email protected] and ssh [email protected]. Below is the error output from running either of these commands:

OpenSSH_7.1p2, OpenSSL 1.0.2g  1 Mar 2016
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug2: ssh_connect: needpriv 0
debug1: Connecting to ec2-18-207-106-113.compute-1.amazonaws.com [18.207.106.113] port 22.
debug1: connect to address 18.207.106.113 port 22: Connection timed out
ssh: connect to host ec2-18-207-106-113.compute-1.amazonaws.com port 22: Connection timed out

These are the solutions that I've tried that did not seem to work:

• Connecting on Windows 10 using PuTTY, FileZilla and command line, but also received the same timeout errors.

• Using a different MSI (first with Bitnami, then with Ubuntu)

• Firewall is disabled

• Resetting the default port in /etc/ssh/ssh_config and connecting to the new port

• Pinging ec2-18-207-106-113.compute-1.amazonaws.com and 18.207.106.113 is successful

• Running command netstat -nat | grep 22 gives the below output

  tcp4       0      0  192.168.254.17.56207   17.249.188.80.5223     ESTABLISHED
  9e4be63389882253 stream      0      0                0 9e4be6338988231b                0                0
  9e4be6338988231b stream      0      0                0 9e4be63389882253                0                0
  9e4be63384ea2193 dgram       0      0                0 9e4be63384ea225b 9e4be63384ea225b                0
  9e4be63384ea225b dgram       0      0                0 9e4be63384ea2193 9e4be63384ea2193                0
  kctl       0      0     22      9 com.apple.netsrc
  

• The EC2 security group has the following inbound rules set up: EC2 Security Group

Answer 1

Welcome to SuperUser @Robert!

All of your clues initially seemed to point to an issue with the Security Group attached to the instance, but your SG rules look fine.

There's a tool called hping that you can get on your Mac (via brew) that you can use to 'ping' port 22 on your 18.207.106.113 server. I tried it and it works:

$ sudo hping -S -p 22 18.207.106.113
HPING 18.207.106.113 (en0 18.207.106.113): S set, 40 headers + 0 data bytes
len=44 ip=18.207.106.113 ttl=42 DF id=0 sport=22 flags=SA seq=0 win=26883 rtt=38.8 ms
len=44 ip=18.207.106.113 ttl=44 DF id=0 sport=22 flags=SA seq=1 win=26883 rtt=39.6 ms
len=44 ip=18.207.106.113 ttl=42 DF id=0 sport=22 flags=SA seq=2 win=26883 rtt=40.7 ms

Now the clues are pointing to an issue on the local side, either your Mac and/or your network. For starters, reset your Mac's /etc/ssh/ssh_config to its default, because you didn't change the SSH port the server is listening on.

If that doesn't work, try putting your Mac onto a different network, perhaps turn on your phone's hotspot and connect to that or go to a friend's house or to a coffee shop.

And if that fails, use a different machine altogether. That should (hopefully) work, then you can work your way back to tracking down what was causing the problem in your equipment.

Good luck!