This is a short post on a gotcha for connecting to a FreeBSD AWS instance. After creating a FreeBSD AWS instance and tying an SSH .pem key to it, you will find that it is not possible to connect. This is not a problem with the SSH key, but with the user account. The "connect" menu has one try to connect as root, this however is incorrect. Simply change the user to "ec2-user@WhateverYourHostnameIs" and you should be able to connect.
Once you log on you will notice there is no `sudo` command available. One may ask "But then how to I become root?". Fret not, the default ec2-user account has permissions to run `su` without a password.
After using `su` to become root, new accounts can be created using the
adduser command.
Hopefully this article helps save some time from trying to troubleshoot an issue that seems to be causing some confusion with AWS FreeBSD users.
