He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.     -Jim Elliot

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Lately, I have been working frequently with a couple EC2 instances. Remote editing on these instances has become a day-to-day task for me. These instances are based on Amazon Linux. I am so used to the "Ubuntu" way of remote editing, which I have described here. With EC2 instances, however, this method seems to be impossible -- as I need to supply the key file when mounting the remote location via SSH.

For example, if I want to SSH to an EC2 instance, I would do

ssh -i /location_to_the_key_file/xxxxxx.pem ec2-user@ec2-server-ip-or-name

Now I want to connect to the EC2 instance from Nautilus. It will be standard procedure: "File -> Connect to Server -> Type: SSH". But where can I supply the key file information? Once again, after some Googling, I found the solution.

ssh-add /location_to_the_key_file/xxxxxx.pem

After running above command, I am able to mount EC2 instance on my local machine using Nautilus. This time no password is needed. In fact, after this step, I am able SSH to EC2 instance without providing a key file. Hope this will help someone. Enjoy!

Reference

Edit:
Above solution is not permanent. To make the change permanent, create a config under your .ssh directory, and add your key files there. For example,

#~/.ssh/config
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/my-ami-key.pem
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/my-ami-key2.pem

Enjoy!

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