In this video, you will see using the console connection. I have already created the console connection by booting the public key that I have in my Cloud Shell machine. The console connection command is available here. Now, when the instance is running, please be careful to understand the console connection doesn't allow you to log in as a normal SSH into the compute instance oils. It is only giving you a session to see what is happening from a console for the compute. If I paste this command to a publisher console connection, you need to be in the directory where the private key is present so that it automatically picks it up. Otherwise, you add the private key part entirely in the command so that it knows where to pick it up. In this case, I am in the directory where the private key is present, so I can hit "Enter" to get a connection established. Typically, it will prompt you to confirm that you want to access this host. You'll have to type "Yes" to establish the authenticity of the host that you want to connect to. Once this is in place, actually the console connection is established. But you don't get a prompt as if you have logged in because of the simple reason, it is only going to show you, for example, if I click "Stop", it prompts whether you want to shut it down from the API level. The moment you confirm, it is going to show you in the console screen that we have here, what is happening as the compute instance is shutting down. In a few minutes, my console connection has the status that it is powered down. My API interface, or my browser console interface is saying it is stopping. When the status is stopping, if you try to go and start, obviously it will throw an error, which is what is happening here. You'll have to wait for this to come to a stop state. Once it comes to a stop state, you can click "Start", and it will give you the screen over here as to how it would have looked like if you had been sitting in front of the computer with the monitor. Right now the status has stopped. Let me click "Start". If you observe the console connection screen, you are going to see the boot screen of the compute instance where you have the ability to choose which boot option you want to use. If you had a Windows environment, it would have given you a safe boot mode, for example. You can go and type "e" to edit the boot configuration, or type "c" to get a single user login, and then you do standard system administration to login. We're not going to look at how do we do that. That is the standard system administration. Once you get into the single user mode, you can go and add a new private key. If your existing private key is corrupted, you add the new public key of the private key that you have so that you can login. Once you have done your job and exit, we will come back to the screen and hitting "Enter" will boot up. As the boot is happening, here the system says it is running from the browser console option, but we can see from the console connection it is still logging in. Now, once you are logged in and the boot sequence is complete, you get a login screen. Please keep in mind you will not be able to login from here. You need to exit from the console connection and make a standard SSH to the public IP or private IP, whatever you have to now login and work. If you wanted to look into the log files of the operating system, you could have gone into single user mode, looked into what is happening, etc, which is something you could have done. With that, we complete this demonstration of performing a console connection, and how you could use to troubleshoot a compute instance.
