15 Apr
2010
15 Apr
'10
7:07 a.m.
Keith Williams wrote:
[snip setup process]
Fire up Putty set VPS ip goto to data page and put in
fred for username
then to ssh>auth page to set attempt using pageant and select the
private key file to use. Press open and lo and behold, it asks me for
password. I put that in and I am logged on. Why is it using passwords,
why ignoring keys?
I presume that as you're using Putty you have only Windows at your end?
If you have access to either a Linux or MacOS X box then I would
suggest trying the ordinary ssh client with the -v option, which will
give you a full narrative of what's going on.
The ssh login sequence will always use keys for preference before
passwords, so the fact that it's falling back to passwords indicates
that the keys are not properly set up.
You may also get useful information by examining /var/log/auth.log just
after a logon attempt. If it has decided not to use keys it should tell
you why here.
I don't think you want 7xx as your file permissions on authorized_keys.
Looking at my systems I have 700 on ~/.ssh and 644 on authorized_keys.
There's no reason for authorized_keys to be executable.
HTH
John