title: generate pem File for EC2 Instance at Amazon
body: <p>For our production systems we are running Amazon EC2 Instances.
  The colleague responsible (say call him Joe) for that has left the company.</p>
  
  <p>Now we want to have <code>ssh</code> access to our instance.</p>
  
  <p>He left us both his private and his public key file.</p>
  
  <pre><code>id_dsa
  id_dsa.pub
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In the backend we can see, that the key "joe" is assigned to the runnning instance and that ssh access is done by the following command:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ssh -i "joe.pem" ec2-user@11.22.11.123
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can we generate a <code>.pem</code> file? Or more generally speaking, what needs to be done in order to get ssh access?</p>
  
  <p>Do we need Certificates from Amazon? If so, how?</p>