# Can't download AWS SSH Keypair

**URL:** <https://forums.suse.com/t/cant-download-aws-ssh-keypair/14398>\
**Category:** General\
**Created:** [May 28, 2019, 4:41pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/cant-download-aws-ssh-keypair/14398 "2019-05-28T16:41:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Stephen\_Jensen](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/forums.suse.com/stephen_jensen/32/5184_2.png) [@Stephen\_Jensen](https://forums.suse.com/u/Stephen_Jensen)\
**Post date:** [May 28, 2019, 4:41pm UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/cant-download-aws-ssh-keypair/14398/1 "2019-05-28T16:41:18Z")

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I am using Rancher with EKS on AWS. I successfully deploy a cluster but I can’t figure out how to download the keypair so I can manually SSH into my nodes. I read that I should be able to do this by going to the nodes section, clicking the 3 dots button and pressing download keys, but I don’t see those options. When I got to AWS, I can see my ec2 instances have pem files associated with them, but I can’t see anywhere I can access them.

Thanks!

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**Author:** ![petertang2012](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/forums.suse.com/petertang2012/32/6692_2.png) [@petertang2012](https://forums.suse.com/u/petertang2012)\
**Post date:** [September 22, 2020, 2:45am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/cant-download-aws-ssh-keypair/14398/2 "2020-09-22T02:45:31Z")

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I face exactly the same problem here, and there does not seem to be documentation on it either.

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**Author:** ![vincent](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/forums.suse.com/vincent/32/7156_2.png) [@vincent](https://forums.suse.com/u/vincent)\
**Post date:** [September 23, 2020, 9:46am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/cant-download-aws-ssh-keypair/14398/3 "2020-09-23T09:46:07Z")

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The action to download keys is for clusters where we’ve created the VMs with docker-machine, which generates a unique key per node. Those nodes are then used to create a RKE cluster out of them.

For EKS you select an _existing_ (public) SSH key for Amazon to put on the nodes when defining the cluster. We don’t have or know the private key that correspond to that public key.

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**Author:** ![petertang2012](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/forums.suse.com/petertang2012/32/6692_2.png) [@petertang2012](https://forums.suse.com/u/petertang2012)\
**Post date:** [September 23, 2020, 10:01am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/cant-download-aws-ssh-keypair/14398/4 "2020-09-23T10:01:59Z")

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Thanks Vincent.

However I was using eks\_config from terraform rancher provider to provision my EKS cluster and it states that key\_pair\_name was optional ([https://registry.terraform.io/providers/rancher/rancher2/latest/docs/resources/cluster#key\_pair\_name](https://registry.terraform.io/providers/rancher/rancher2/latest/docs/resources/cluster#key_pair_name)) so I did not give it an existing key leading to Rancher creating a new EC2 key pair and assigning it to EKS worker nodes that Rancher created. I looked around and seems there is no way to retrieve that Rancher created key pair anymore now.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![vincent](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex022/user_avatar/forums.suse.com/vincent/32/7156_2.png) [@vincent](https://forums.suse.com/u/vincent)\
**Post date:** [September 23, 2020, 11:08am UTC](https://forums.suse.com/t/cant-download-aws-ssh-keypair/14398/5 "2020-09-23T11:08:25Z")

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It’s all CloudFormation so you could poke around and maybe it’s somewhere there, but I don’t think we persist a copy of it for that case. (@luther?)