Ubuntu – SSH Permission denied (using right password)

I am having troubles setting an ssh connection between two laptops of mine. I tried different solutions posted on-line, but nothing worked. Since I am pretty new with SSH, I might be missing something important. I am using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on the client, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on the server.

Here are the steps that I followed:

On the client:

• Specified host configuration options in ~/.ssh/config:

  Host [hostname]

    User [username]
    Hostname [IP address of host]
    ServerAliveInterval 10
  

• Generated RSA key by running:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -o -a 100

• I supplied a password to ssh-keygen. Private key was saved in ~/.ssh/id_rsa, whereas public key was saved in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

• I manually copied ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to a USB key.

• At this point, file modes are as follows:

In ~/.ssh:

   -rw-rw-r--    config
   -rw-------    id_rsa
   -rw-r--r--    id_rsa.pub

On the server:

• installed openssh-server;

• created a new file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys by doing as follows

cat /media/daniele/disk/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

• set file mode of ~/.ssh/authorized_keys to

-rw-rw-r–

• manually edited /etc/ssh/sshd_config to have

in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

RSAAuthentication yes
PubkeyAuthentication yes
AuthorizedKeysFile     %h/.ssh/authorized_keys
PasswordAuthentication yes

Finally, on the client, when I try:

ssh [username]@[hostname]

the server asks for the password

[username]@[hostname]'s password:

but, even if I enter the correct one, the server does not accept it:

Permission denied, please try again

and, after three attempts, it closes the connection. Please find here a more descriptive output I get by using

ssh -v -v -v [username]@[hostname]

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much for your time