I do apologise if this seems a stupid question. I am struggling with this and probably missing something very basic. Have done the initials - changed password to strong random one. Set up iptables - all ports closed off except port 22 and 80. Fail2Ban running and configured, I will change ssh to another port later. Set up non-root user, let's call him fred - with again a strong password. Checked sshd config file - using protocol 2. Used puttygen to generate keypair, private key secured with a near-gibberish longish passphrase, loaded private key into pageant. Saved public key to /home/fred/.ssh/authorised_keys then chmod that to 744 and .ssh directory (tried them also at 700 same effect). Changed PasswordAuthorisation in sshd config file to no 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? At my age you can't afford to lose too much hair, but I am pulling it out over this Keith -- Keith The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps. www.westnorfolkrspca.org.uk _______________________________________________ users mailing list users(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users

Keith Williams wrote: [snip setup process] 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 _______________________________________________ users mailing list users(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users