Background We recently had a problem with one of our AWS EC2 Instances after shutting it down, making some configuration changes and starting it back up. We were unable to SSH onto the machines despite the fact that the machine came up OK (we would keep getting a Connection Refused error). We reviewed the Security Group settings, Network Settings, reverted our configuration changes, made sure we were pointing to the correct IP address and much more, but we still couldn’t SSH onto the machine. Upon viewing the system logs, we noticed that one of the disk volumes failed to be mounted onto the machine. It was an Instance Store drive that apparently was remounted onto the machine after restarting it under a different device name. This prevented the boot up from completing, which as a result prevented the sshd daemon from being started up to allow us to SSH onto the machine. With us not being…