From the course: Running Microsoft Workloads on AWS

Retrieve an instance password

From the course: Running Microsoft Workloads on AWS

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Retrieve an instance password

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- [Male Instructor] If you've watched the video on creating an EC2 instance, you probably noticed that one of the pieces of information that the wizard didn't ask me for was a default password, and we can't log into a Windows virtual machine instance without knowing what the Windows password is. So, how do we get that password? Well, the way that we do that is by selecting the virtual machine that we want to log into, and then going to actions. And you'll notice that we have a menu option right here - Get Windows Password. I'll go ahead and click on that now. And now I'm taken to the Retrieve Default Windows Administrator Password dialogue box. And, so, as you'll recall, we had to associate a key pair with the virtual machine instance when we created it, and we can see that, right here, we used a key named LinkedIn and that key has a corresponding file that is saved out to my hard disk. I did this in one of the earlier videos. So, what I have to do is find that file, and provide it right here and then I'll be able to decrypt the password. So, what I'm going to do is click on Browse, and so you can see the key file right here. That's the PEM file. I'll go ahead and click Open, and we can see the private key right here, and it's a great big long thing, but now that I've got the private key, all I have to do is click decrypt password and I can see that the password decryption was successful, and that a password change is recommended, and so now I can see that the default username is administrator, and here's my default password. So, these are the credentials that I'll use to log into the virtual machine instance for the first time. So, that's how you go about retrieving a password for Windows virtual machine instance in Amazon EC2.

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