You can generate the keypair yourself and import the public key, or you can have AWS generate the keypair and you download the private key. When you create a server, you have to specify which SSH keypair to use out of the public keys AWS has stored with your account. I'm writing a tool to create new Amazon Web Services servers, using the AWS Java API. Now we have the analog of pageant running, an agent with no keys loaded.īy itself will add (by default) the private keys listed in the default identity files in ~/.ssh. I found that somewhere on the 'net and it ended a few hours of beating my head against the wall. That $SHELL was the magic trick I needed to make the agent run and stay running. The method that worked for me was to use: The Linux analog to this scenario is accomplished using ssh-agent (the pageant analog) and ssh-add (the analog to adding a private key to pageant). host would, of course, have to be holding the public key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. The analog for this is that Linux, acting as an ssh client, has an agent holding a decrypted private key so that when TCSgrad types 'ssh host' the ssh command will get his private key and go without being prompted for a password. Then, the ssh client, putty, can log in to machines where his public key is listed as 'authorized' without a password prompt. That is, there is an agent (pageant) which holds a decrypted copy of a private key so that the passphrase only needs to be put in once. I think what TCSgrad was trying to ask (a few years ago) was how to make Linux behave like his Windows machine does. Should convert an existing puttygen public key to OpenSSH format. ssh-keygen -i -f keyfile.pub > newkeyfile.pub You've sent this key back to the user 15 times. Password even though everyone else's keys are working fine, and No error message in the auth log except, no key found, trying HOWEVER, sysadmins, you invariably get the wonky key file that throws Key pair in puttygen, copy the public key and paste it into a textįile with the extension. The Solution: When you get to the public key screen in creating your Puts some data in different areas and adds line breaks.

Public key using puttygen it won't work on a linux server. However, what isn't addressed is that when you save the Puttygen provides a neat utility to convert a linux private key to The most common way to make a key on Windows is using Putty/Puttygen. I keep forgetting this so I'm gonna write it here. If all you have is a public key from a user in PuTTY-style format, you can convert it to standard openssh format like so: ssh-keygen -i -f keyfile.pub > newkeyfile.pub

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