connect to linode with Putty using pub key
Hi,
I was fiddling with ssh config to make it a bit more secure, and it seems to be working when connecting from PowerShell but the same key is not accepted using Putty.
I disabled PasswordAuthentication and ChallengeReponse in sshd_config and I've set ssh key in my Windows .ssh folder with matching key in in /home/user/.ssh/authorized_keys on Linode.
As said, I can connect successfully using the key and passphrase from PowerShell, but when I try to use the same key with Putty (set in Auth. configuration) I am getting "No supported authentication methods available (server sent: publickey)".
I was trying to change the format of the key as suggested on some comments online however I couldn't make it work.
Could you please let me know in case I am doing something obviously wrong ?
Thanks!
2 Replies
watrick
Linode Staff
Breaking things is usually the best way to learn about them.
I'm not very familiar with PuTTY, as I don't have much experience with Windows machines. While doing some research on this, I found this post online about running SSH from Powershell:
In that article, it briefly discusses how there are two types of pub key file types that you'll need, which I believe you referred to in your post here. This other Community Questions post goes into a little more detail about the two types and how to generate them:
To accomplish this, you will most likely need to access your Linode via LISH (LInode SHell). LISH is an out of band connection, which you can use to connect to your Linode to fix the things that break.
PuTTY has a specific key format which is not compatible with the OpenSSH key format.
You can use the PuTTYgen tool to load in your OpenSSH private key and save it in PuTTY’s native format.
Additionally you can generate a key within PuTTYgen and it will give you the public key for your authorized_keys file.
This article explains how to do this in more detail.