tamoyal

# Create your superuser
$ mongo
> use admin
> db.createUser({user:"someadmin",pwd:"secret", roles:[{role:"root",db:"admin"}]})
> exit

# Alias for convenience (optional and at your own risk)
$ echo 'alias mongo="mongo --port 27017 -u someadmin -p secret --authenticationDatabase admin"' >> ~/.bash_profile
$ source ~/.bash_profile

tamoyal

Note: This is mainly useful for instances you are essentially locked out of in the case where you don't want to create a new instance.

1. Launch a micro instance with your new key (we'll call this the "key transitioning instance"). This instance will need to be in the same availability zone ("us-east-1b", for example) as the instances you are locked out of.
2. Make sure you can ssh in
3. Select the instance you are locked out of and make note of the attached EBS volume ID which will look something like vol-6a844e25 and the Root Device which will look something like /dev/sda1.
4. Stop the EC2 instance you are locked out of
5. Go to that instance's Root Device EBS volume and detach it
6. Re-attach the EBS volume to the key transitioning instance
7. On the key transitioning instance, run sudo fdisk -l
8. Note the "Device" column output from this command that is similar to the "Attachment information" which is displayed when you select the EBS volume (we'll use /dev/xvdf1 as an example). That will be yo