Mark, the description of your actions seemed to be a mixture of the instructions of two different SSH products. Perhaps there is a misunderstanding somewhere?
There are two possible configuration styles, depending on whether your ssh product is OpenSSH (or its derivative, like HP's free Secure Shell for HP-UX) or a commercial product from ssh.com.
-----------
For OpenSSH, the public key should be just one very long line of text. It should be copied into the authorized_keys file as is:
cat publickey.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
If you need to allow access for multiple keys, just append all keys to the same file, one key per line.
If the public key is currently in multi-line format, you can use the import function of the OpenSSH ssh-keygen tool to convert it:
ssh-keygen -i -f multi-line-key.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
-----------
For the ssh.com commercial product (Tectia SSH or whatever it's currently named), the key should be in multi-line format. In this case, the key file goes to the ~/.ssh directory (or ~/.ssh2 with some versions), and there should be a file named ~/.ssh/authorization (or ~/.ssh2/authorization), listing the name(s) of the key file(s), prefixed with the word "Key":
mv multi-line-key.pub ~/.ssh/
echo "Key multi-line-key.pub" >> ~/.ssh/authorization
If you need to allow multiple keys, that can be done by using multiple Key lines in the authorization file.
If the public key you've received is in single-line form, the ssh-keygen utility of the commercial SSH product should likewise have an import function that can convert the key to the correct form. Unfortunately I cannot recall the correct syntax for it.
-------------
Another point to check is file ownerships and permissions. The .ssh directory and the authorized_keys (or authorization) file must be protected so that only the owner of the account can write to it.
Likewise, the user's home directory cannot be writeable by anyone other than the user itself. If you need other users to be able to write files to the user's home directory, create a sub-directory under the user's home dir and arrange for the files to be written there.
MK
MK
