Using Panic Prompt with EC2

15Apr11

Yesterday, Panic introduced Prompt, an SSH client for iOS. It took a little trial and error to get it working with EC2 .pem files, but I eventually succeeded. Since a lot of the blog comments show other users struggling with the same thing, here’s what worked for me.

Your .pem file is an RSA private key. You need to generate an RSA public key from it. On Mac OS X, I did this by typing “ssh-keygen -y > foo.pub” and entering foo.pem when prompted for the key file.
Make a copy of your foo.pem file to get rid of the extension. Now you have “foo” as the private key and “foo.pub” as the public key.
If Prompt is running on your iPhone, do a hard exit (show the iPhone app switcher UI, long-press the Prompt icon to show the delete adornment).
Connect the iPhone to your computer
In iTunes, use File Sharing to transfer first foo.pub, then foo.

Hopefully you should see the key showing up in Prompt now.

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6 Responses to “Using Panic Prompt with EC2”

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1 Wardy on April 16, 2011 said:

Great instructions, thanks. In step 2 it says ‘and “foo.pem” as the public key’ – presumably this is meant to be foo.pub (so that you’ve got foo and foo.pub).

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- 2 Joe Cheng on April 16, 2011 said:
  
  Wardy: yes exactly, thanks. Updated.
  
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3 T on April 16, 2011 said:

Thanks Joey, just wat I was waiting for! Works like charm.

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4 Sarkazein on April 29, 2011 said:

Thanks so much for this! EC2 support was the one thing holding me back from getting Prompt.

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