I have an Ubuntu server on Amazon EC2, that I use for development, and today I stupidly cleared everything out of my ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
file. Luckily I have an SSH open, so I am still connected, and can fix the file, but when I try to put my key file back, it doesn't work. I still get permission denied from the server on my local machine.
authorized_keys
has the permissions 600. I have tried appending my SSH key with ssh-rsa and leaving the ssh-rsa off. I also tried making the SSH key all one line, but that didn't work either.
Is there something else that I have to do like reload the file some how?
Best Answer
You should never save the file with its contents starting with
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
on the server, that is your private key. Instead, you must put the public key into the~/.ssh/authorized_keys
file.This public key has the
.pub
extension when generated usingssh-keygen
and its contents begin withssh-rsa AAAAB3
. (The binary format is described in the answers to this question).The permissions of
~/.ssh
on the server should be 700. The file~/.ssh/authorized_keys
(on the server) is supposed to have a mode of 600. The permissions of the (private) key on the client-side should be 600.If the private key was not protected with a password, and you put it on the server, I recommend you to generate a new one:
You can skip this if you're fully sure that nobody can recover the deleted private key from the server.
If this does not help, run
ssh
with options for more verbosity:On the server side, you can review
/var/log/auth.log
for details.