When I attempt to bootstrap an EC2 server using knife I receive:
ec2-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com ERROR: While executing gem … (Errno::EACCES)
ec2-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com Permission denied – /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rbconfig

I have tried specifying -s true in the bootstrap command but it seems to make no difference. What is the right way to do this? Could there be another non-obvious issue at hand here?

Based on what I see in the source (https://github.com/opscode/knife-ec2/blob/master/lib/chef/knife/ec2_server_create.rb) :

  option :ssh_user,
    :short => "-x USERNAME",
    :long => "--ssh-user USERNAME",
    :description => "The ssh username",
    :default => "root"
...
bootstrap.config[:ssh_user] = config[:ssh_user]

I can’t think of single way of specifying a value for ssh_user inside the knife.rb file and not on the command line. Am I right about this? Or can someone illuminate me with some syntax I’m missing? So far I used trial & error to test the following but they didn’t get picked up:

config[:ssh_user]             = "ec2-user"
ssh_user                      = "ec2-user"