Amazon EC2 || RHEL || Connection refused on port 22 after reboot

Question

I am aware that this question is asked many times in forums and I have tried all solutions mentioned in them, but no luck.

Actually, I doubt when last time I was trying to replace the /etc/sysconfig/iptables with my own iptables rules, I mistakenly replaced /etc/init.d/iptables and restarted the machine. And as expected it didn't start. Then I detached the EBS from this instance and attached to a new RHEL instance and fix the mess up by copying back the /etc/init.d/iptables from backup (I used to take backups before replacement :) ) and same for /etc/sysconfig/iptables. I have also put some custom startup scripts in /etc/init.d folder for our application to start on instance reboot. I have removed those too to make sure any of my script is not causing this. But still system is not allowing me to connect via ssh. AWS console is showing 2/2 checks being successful, but not able to connect via 22.

Here is the last few lines of system log which states that something wrong is happening after or on iptables startup but not showing what. :(

blkfront: xvde1: barriers disabled
Changing capacity of (202, 65) to 62914560 sectors
xvde1: detected capacity change from 0 to 32212254720
EXT4-fs (xvde1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: 
dracut: Mounted root filesystem /dev/xvde1
dracut: Loading SELinux policy
type=1404 audit(1398404320.826:2): enforcing=1 old_enforcing=0 auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295
type=1403 audit(1398404321.795:3): policy loaded auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295
dracut: 
dracut: Switching root
udev: starting version 147
Initialising Xen virtual ethernet driver.
microcode: CPU0 sig=0x306e4, pf=0x1, revision=0x415
platform microcode: firmware: requesting intel-ucode/06-3e-04
Microcode Update Driver: v2.00 <tigran@aivazian.fsnet.co.uk>, Peter Oruba
NET: Registered protocol family 10
lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions
ip6_tables: (C) 2000-2006 Netfilter Core Team
nf_conntrack version 0.5.0 (16384 buckets, 65536 max)
ip_tables: (C) 2000-2006 Netfilter Core Team

Can anyone help me in identifying what is going wrong here?

Answer 1

Got it fixed.

Actually, it was not the problem of iptables. Again it was due to the known bug in RHEL 6.4 on EC2 which puts wrong entries in sshd_config files. Although, I have checked this file for wrong entries in my first attempt to resolve the issue, somehow it was being created again, may be because every time I start a new machine using my AMI or new RHEL 6.4 AMI. In both cases, AMI is still registered as 6.4, though the OS on the disk is updated to 6.5. May be this was the reason that it was creating wrong entries in sshd_config. Now, again I have fixed this file for wrong entries and created new AMI using RHEL 6.5 and attached the EBS volume from instance created using my RHEL 6.4 AMI, it works fine.