Amazon EC2 - Server Refused Our key - Putty Login Error

I have started an Ubuntu 8 GB, 64-bit Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) instance. When I was trying to access the instance via Putty, I have received error Server refused our key. Screen below for your reference:

Solution that worked for me is by changing the User Name in Putty from ec2-user to ubuntu.

To fix this error I tried so may things. I was at the stage that I removed everything from my AWS account and re-created key-value pair, Instance, and Security group but that still didn't work.

Sometimes, taking a small break from work does wonderful things.

What is Windows.old folder and how to Reclaim disk space occupied by it

What is Windows.old folder?

This folder is created if you install windows 7 by performing a custom installation or upgrade your Windows 7 Operating system without formatting the partition.

Why the folder gets created?

Files that were used in the previous version of Windows are backed up here during installation.

It provide a roll back point to restore your previous OS if you don't like Windows 7. Also, you can restore data from this backup directory.

For example: If you lost your Mozilla firefox bookmarks during OS upgrade, you can restore them from Windows.old directory. Refer post - Recover Firefox Bookmarks.



Is it safe to delete that folder?

Windows.old directory does occupy good amount of hard disk space. If you find that nothing is missing after upgrade, you can delete this folder else you can keep it for a while just in case you need some file from previous Windows installation. And, remove it later once you are sure nothing is missing.

I removed mine after couple of weeks since I was running out of C: drive space.



Safely reclaim disk space?

You can use disk cleanup utility to safely remove this folder.

Right click on the C:> drive, go to Properties and click on "Disk Cleanup".

Then, click on "Clean up system files" which will calculate all system files you can clean from your system.

Now, select the "Previous Windows installation(s)" check box and click OK.

Confirm by clicking "Delete files" on next window and you are done.

Thank you. I hope its helpful.

Backup and Recover Mozilla Firefox Bookmarks (On Windows)

Step 1: Firefox creates backup of your browser bookmarks everyday in JSON file format. Go to folder %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\bookmarkbackups.

• xxxxxxxx.default : A folder where 'xxxxxxxx' is some random number.
• %APPDATA% : An environment variable. To see what value it holds, just type 'echo %APPDATA%' on command prompt.

You will see many .json files there.







Step 2: Open firefox and Press (Ctrl + Shift + B) to open 'Show All Bookmarks' window.







Step 3: then, click menu Import and Backup --> Restore --> Choose File... and, redirect and select the latest ".json" file from location shown in Step 1.

 

 

Step 4: Click OK on the popup below.





Step 5: Verify your bookmarks.





How to change your bookmark backup settings:

By default, Firefox backup your bookmarks for last 15 days. To edit this setting, type about:config in firefox URL and search for the attribute browser.bookmarks.max_backups. Double click on the value and enter the desired value.



Please leave a comment if you find this post helpful. Thanks